One out of
Five stars
Running time:
107 mins
Poorly written, atrociously acted and appallingly directed, Got to Run is staggeringly inept on every conceivable level and should be avoided at all costs.
What's it all about?
Written, directed and produced by one-man film industry Robbie Moffat (look him up – he's basically Britain's own Ed Wood), Got to Run stars Suzanne Kendall as jogging enthusiast Sarah McGuire, who's fed up with her rubbish boyfriend (Howard Corlett) and hates her job as a travelling lingerie saleswoman for sexist Northerner boss Jack Pratt (Jon Paul Gates). Pouring out her troubles to a kindly Scottish barman (Bruce Lawrence), Sarah is handed a list of ten picturesque locations to jog in and told that if she completes the list it will change her life.
The Bad
There's so much that's wrong with Got to Run that it's difficult to know where to start: the performances are atrocious - the standard of acting would shame ... well, a group of dyslexic non-actors gathering to read a script for the first time, and the dialogue sounds like it's been recorded on a mobile phone. On top of that, all the supporting characters have stunningly bad accents, ranging from French (Laura Cleary's sex shop manager) to Scottish (Jimmy The Barman) to “European” (a palm-reader) to what must be the worst “Oirish” accent ever committed to celluloid (Joe Rainbow's sleazy businessman).
However, the film's biggest problem is the script, which devotes at least 50 minutes of its punishing 107 minute running time to lengthy, five minute-plus shots of Sarah jogging in ALL TEN picturesque locations. It's not like this is cinematic, Run, Lola, Run-style running, either: it's as exciting as watching a real-life jogger for 50 minutes, only accompanied by the hideous elevator-style “orchestral” music that's apparently an integral part of Sarah's running routine (the rest of the film is aggressively scored with what sounds suspiciously like porn-jazz).
The Worse
Aside from its paper-thin plot and jaw-droppingly ludicrous finale, the script is also wildly inconsistent; for example, Sarah says she hates her job but she seems to really enjoy pushing Cleary's character closer to bankruptcy. And let's not even talk about the scene where she happily flashes her tits in order to sell Rainbow's character another five boxes of sexy pants.
Worth seeing?
Oh, hell no, at least, not unless you're some sort of masochist. Got to Run is comfortably the worst film of the year, if not the decade. A film so bad that it makes all previous one star films look like masterpieces by comparison.