Cast: Simon Pegg, Paul Freeman, Amara Karan
Director: Crispian Mills, Chris Hopewell
Country: UK
Genre: Comedy
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Note: A Fantastic Fear of Everything opens tomorrow in limited release and is now available on VOD
At one of the more overzealous animated interludes in the midst of A Fantastic Fear of Everything—and there’s plenty to pick from—the title comes flying into view, colliding with the name of the movie’s star and sending it flying swiftly off-screen. How extraordinarily apt an image it is; like the type that bears its title, this film is a challenge to Simon Pegg’s place on the silver screen, a colourful calamity that threatens to toss him straight from centre-stage. It’s a disastrous misfire that puts his star status to a test it fails with fleeting colours, a sinking ship in trouble right out of harbour and dependant on its captain to see it to safety. But Simon, oh Simon, he can’t even swim to save himself.
…like the type that bears its title, this film is a challenge to Simon Pegg’s place on the silver screen, a colourful calamity that threatens to toss him straight from centre-stage.
Pegg’s prime success has been as the everyman at the heart of an oddball ensemble, the reactionary regular around whom the world gradually falls apart. A Fantastic Fear of Everything, then, seems a fine fit for his particular star skills; adapted—if loosely, and strangely without credit—from a story by Bruce Robinson of Withnail & I fame, its paranoid wreck writer of a central character might react primarily to a world of his imagination, but it’s no less a role that calls for the kind of humdrum hysteria at which Pegg has proved himself an expert in the past. But thrust to the fore as never quite before—agoraphobia, naturally, makes for many a solo scene—he’s here only extremely and embarrassingly out of his depth.
He can hardly be blamed, with material this bad; it’s tempting to think that Robinson remains uncredited for fear of being associated with a movie so insistently unfunny. His work—Withnail especially, visually referenced here whether knowing or not—has always thrived on a humour found in the darkness, the skittish silliness of sad sacks all but lost to the world. But here only the silliness remains, amplified to an extent that’s overbearing in the extreme. Writer and co-director Crispian Mills, a musician making his first foray into film production, has Pegg hurtle himself about the set with slapstick abandon, never more awkwardly undignified than when, for no real reason at all, he subjects us to an extended rap number performed in his underwear.
He delivers his dialogue—or monologue, more aptly, given how often he’s only inexplicably speaking to himself—with a conviction that suggests he might well believe in the material. If only he could imbue it with something to make that true for the viewer, too.
Both the production design and the sophistication of the humour suggest BBC daytime children’s programming; there is only the occasional self-satisfied swear word to remind us that yes, adults are indeed expected to enjoy this. The aforesaid animation—much of it stop-motion and quite beautifully crafted, make no mistake—offers animal-based morality tales again distinguished only by the crudeness of the language. What Mills is aiming for here is a mystery, almost as much of one as why Pegg signed on. He delivers his dialogue—or monologue, more aptly, given how often he’s only inexplicably speaking to himself—with a conviction that suggests he might well believe in the material. If only he could imbue it with something to make that true for the viewer, too.
Whether it’s to Mills or his co-director, music video helmer Chris Hopewell, that credit’s due for an appealing aesthetic is perhaps an easy guess to make. The strong, shadow-soaked cinematography of the underworked Simon Chaudoir lends the night-time shadows an impressive weight that might have made interesting any efforts to lend sincerity to a source by all accounts quite concerned with the way in which an author is affected by that of which they write. Mills, though, is more concerned with using his material as a conduit to jokes about Asian stereotypes and gags about women drivers. A Fantastic Fear of Everything is a terribly aggravating wreck, a comedy whose few fleeting moments of success only emphasise all the more what an awfully uninteresting effort it is.
[notification type=”star”]43/100 ~ BAD. A Fantastic Fear of Everything is a terribly aggravating wreck, a comedy whose few fleeting moments of success only emphasise all the more what an awfully uninteresting effort it is.[/notification]
