Hitchcock meets Edgar Wright. That is exactly what this film feels like to me. If that isn't enough to sell you, then I don't know what is. Oh, right, the rest of my review will be. Or won't be, as the case may be.
Simon Pegg plays an author with crippling paranoia and suffering from delusions and hallucinations. The film starts out as a clever deconstruction of the author and all the difficulties he is having with his paranoia and fears as we slowly learn more about him, his life that has been a very sad series of events and traumas. It actually continues to be that as we watch the very solid cinematography and direction pile on the crazy and blur the lines between reality and paranoia.
Then the entire movie throws all of that out at the 2/3 mark and just becomes a comedic thriller where Simon Pegg has to save the hot girl he just made a fool of himself in front of from a silly serial killer.
Talk about the villain from the second Iron Man film, which is totally underrated, by the way.
The direction is very Edgar Wright styled, which worked really well. The writing was missing Wright's style of character depth and dialogue, but Pegg had something really interesting going on. "Had" is the operative word here. I can't even recommend the movie with how just awful the final act is. It doesn't even feel like it was directed by the same guy, with crazy sound editing mistakes and horrible lighting. My wife said a thing that I want to quote: "On the one hand, I'm really relieved that he gets a happy ending, but that makes it a worse movie."
I am not relieved. I am not relieved the film is over. I'm tired. I'm sad. I wanted this to be as good as Paul was, the film that got me writing these reviews in earnest again. Or at least as good as The World's End, which also had a disheartening finale, though nowhere near as bad as this film's.
Grade: C-
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