Run Ronnie Run! Reviews

After some distribution controversy following its premiere at Sundance, the satirical comedy Run Ronnie Run! was released straight to video. The home video format is just as well, since the story is an extended version of one skit from Mr. Show, anyway. Devoted fans of the HBO series may be disappointed by the lack of nonstop hilarity, a high standard that the creative team of Bob Odenkirk and David Cross have set for themselves. The Ronnie Dobbs joke just isn't that funny to begin with, and it's stretched out to fill a whole movie under the mediocre direction of Troy Miller, whose next effort was the prequel Dumb & Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd. To their credit, Bob and David -- who both claim the movie is really not that great -- do spice things up with a few incisive side bits, most notably the Three Times One Minus One music video for "Ronnie and Kayla's Love Theme." But other extraneous gags seem to be thrown in with no added comic value, like the Jack Black segment and the overuse of cameos. Yet in the Bob and David universe, everything can be seen as some kind of potential joke, and historically the translation from skit to feature is never an easy one. Run Ronnie Run! is an unfortunate mistake, but it's still better than actual reality programming.