Review by Matt Finley
Dax Shepard really likes fast cars. He
likes talking about fast cars, driving fast cars, and he loves
filming himself talking about fast cars while driving them. Whether
these pre-occupations warrant a feature-length action comedy I guess
depends on how much you, the viewer, like watching Dax Shepard doing
these things.
HIT & RUN, which Shepard
wrote himself and co-directed with David Palmer (with whom he
worked on 2010’s BROTHER JUSTICE), is a strange movie.
I won’t say it’s quite the cinematic equivalent of someone waving
at their mom from a merry-go-round… but it’s close. Shepard
performed most of his own driving stunts, cast a crew of Hollywood
buds plus his spouse – the button-cute Kristen Bell - and uses the
narrative as much to grocery list and riff through his own comedic
and cultural fixations as he does to tell an engaging filmic story.
Shepard plays Charlie, an affable loser
who, after testifying against homicidal bank robber Alex Dimitri
(Bradley Cooper) and his cronies, is permanently exiled to small-town
America as a condition of witness protection. When his new
girlfriend, Annie (Bell), gets offered a dream job in LA, home to the
bad mamma-jammas he squealed on, he has to choose between lonely
small-town purgatory and love (with a possible side of revenge
murder). Playing out like a simpler, dumber IT’S A MAD MAD MAD
MAD WORLD, Charlie and Annie leave only to be pursued by a
bumbling US Marshall (Tom Arnold), Annie’s douchey
ex-boyfriend, Gil (Smallville’s Michael Rosenbaum), two small town
cops, and the vengeful murderers.
As someone whose never been a
machine-head or clutch-face or whatever the automobile aficionados
are calling themselves these days, the film’s diversity of cars and
obsession with vehicular motion was nigh meaningless to me. I
wouldn’t know a sweet ride if it ran over my cat. I can appreciate
the rubber-burning acrobatics of a well-choreographed car chase and
know the guilty adrenal satisfaction of watching a fast, heavy object
play chicken with physics, but HIT & RUN’s car fixation
comes from a much more adenoidal place – all engine revving and
snorting machinery, slow-motion donuts and shock-testing desert
pursuits.
All this to say, it’s less about the
narrative of a chase, or the acrobatic potential of skilled pilots to
make metal behemoths appear lighter than air, than it is re:
the sheer loud bigness of cars… a celebration of wiener-swinging
VROOM VROOM in deference to artifice that I’m not nearly macho
enough to appreciate.
I do, however, usually enjoy comedy.
And HIT & RUN has a whole scattershot pallet of jokey
dialogue and slapstick buffoonery, much of it at the price of the
already wafer-thin story. I will say this: props to Tom Arnold, who,
whether by a feat of comedic skill or just sheer apathetic
willingness, face plants his way through a gauntlet of physical and
emotional humiliations while still managing to portray the most fully
drawn character in the film - sweaty, clumsy, insecure, histrionic,
unshakably dedicated to his badge, and, most importantly, relatable
in a way that other characters - Cooper’s inscrutable, sociopathic
bank robber for example – are not.
As for Shepard’s dialogue, much of it
sounds like the outline for stand-up bits. It’s hard to take the
bad guys seriously when they’re willing to indulge in endless
asinine banter with their would-be foils. Conversations tend to veer
swiftly into comedic vignettes, isolated from both the characters and
the story. There’s a rant about cheap dog food, a bit about the use
of the word “faggot” lifted almost directly from Louis C.K.’s
Chewed Up special (sans humor and wit), a flaccid attempt at
gross-out shock humor featuring elderly swingers, and an interminable
riff on the race politics of anal rape. Paired with chest-puffed
gangsterizing , much of it sounds like 14-year-old Seth Rogan
attempting to emulate Tarantino.
I know… grumble, grouse, grump. I
guess there is something mildly charming about the film -
whereas other celebrities use passion projects as an excuse to wallow
in their own overcooked political myopathy, Shepard’s content to
jump cars off of ramps, BS with bros and make-out with his wife. Like
Shepard himself, HIT & RUN's best bits boast a goofy,
shaggy-haired affability that‘s unmaliciously simple.
The relationship plot, for
example, hum-drum as it is, totally works. Shepard and his wife
are (understandably) adorable together – her with her Veronica Mars
snarkiness, him with his slackeresque nonchalance. Between all the
down-shifting and casual cussing, there’s a passable, effortlessly
organic romantic comedy here.
Were the movie content to remain an
impassioned homegrown oddity, rather than a bafflingly inept
mainstream action comedy, it would have a shot at winning me over.
But, hey, clutch-faces… Cars! (2 out of 4 stars)
Dax Shepard should be like Roberto Benigni and refuse to do love scenes with anyone other than his actress-wife. In fact, a Constitutional Amendment requiring that kind of thing might keep a lot more showbiz marriages together. Either that or eliminate all love scenes, which is also acceptable. Romney/Ryan 2012 approves this message.
ReplyDelete