Daily Archives: October 5, 2008

Reviewlet: Run, Fat Boy, Run

We subscribe to the full Sky “six billion channels of stuff” package, and every now and again look to see if it’s worth trying to save a bit of money by removing a few channels. The expensive bits are sports and movies, but there’s enough rugby and NFL to keep the sports channels, and if you’ve got those, it’s not much more for movies; about the same price as a cinema ticket, or membership of a DVD rental scheme (but without the hassle of walking all the way to a postbox). It’s quite handy, then, for films that you wouldn’t mind seeing, but don’t seem worth a full cinema trip. Case in point, Run, Fat Boy, Run.

Run, Fat Boy, Run is a totally formulaic film. The most remarkable thing about it is that it’s actually simultaneously two totally formulaic films, the Sporting Underdog and the Romantic Comedy, specifically the lovable slacker (Simon Pegg) winning his ex (Thandie Newton) back from the seemingly-perfect new boyfriend (Hank Azaria). Sorry if I’ve given away the entire plot there; towards the beginning I thought it might actually subvert the form slightly and have Azaria be as nice as he initially seemed, but no, quelle surprise. It’s very much, as Mark Kermode would put it, a “tab A into slot B” film, ticking on to its inevitable conclusion. Within those parameters it works well enough mostly thanks to the cast; not a bad way of spending a brain-dead evening when too zonked to even log in to a game, and a couple more like that in a month justify the movie channels.