A Rather Preposterous Story With At Best Mild Humour

Rating: 4/10 (19 May 2009)

To start off with the obvious - you cannot start training for a marathon three weeks before the race (having never run - not having never run a marathon but having never run competitively) - and expect to have any chance in the world of actually finishing the race. So, right off the top there was a general lack of credibility here. I had to couple that with my immediate distaste for the "hero" of the story (Dennis, played by Simon Pegg) who, in the opening scenes, skips out of his wedding to his pregnant fiancé (he later tries to weasel out of the responsibility for that by telling Libby that he chose to ruin her day to avoid ruining her life - except that the opening of the movie clearly portrays a Dennis who is scared sh****ss at the prospect of marriage. In other words, he wasn't thinking of Libby - he just ran away to avoid living up to his responsibility.) Dennis then becomes a sort of sympathetic character thanks only to the introduction of the truly obnoxious American Whit (played by Hank Azaria) who steals Libby's heart, and starts to replace Dennis in the eyes of his son. To bring Whit down to size, Dennis ends up running against him in a charity marathon (running for erectile dysfunction - yeah, pretty typical of the level of the humour here.) Filled with an assortment of other strange characters, this movie ended up being a major disappointment to me. 4/10