A regrettable assumption of poor quality

I'm not sure when it happened, but I have come to think of the appearance of Simon Pegg in a movie as being a surefire indicator of its poor quality.

Maybe not just the appearance, since I'd still say he holds promise in a supporting role. But any time he's the lead? Any time it's a Simon Pegg vehicle? Watch out.

I'm not sure when it happened, but I'm sure how. It happened because Simon Pegg suddenly stopped being able to turn down a role, and suddenly, his face was on every second movie poster you saw.

This is something that has existed in my subconscious for some time now. It became conscious this week, when my wife and I were considering options to watch on our anniversary, which is today. One of those she suggested was Man Up, and I thought to myself with a grimace, "Oh, that's that Simon Pegg movie."

That's that Simon Pegg movie? What?

It's true. This inherently charming Brit who won his way into our hearts with Shaun of the Dead, then never left, has come to symbolize inferior quality for me.

Let's take a step back and figure out how this whole thing happened.

I started to realize that Pegg was fallible around 2007, when he appeared in the highly disappointing David Schwimmer-directed Run Fatboy Run. The bloom was really off the rose the following year with How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, an entertaining book but a terrible movie.

But Pegg wasn't down for the count. His next film was Star Trek, an unqualified hit -- but a film where, tellingly, he played a comparatively minor role. Paul in 2011 was also a big favorite of mine, but he was a co-lead in that with longtime collaborator Nick Frost (as well as, I suppose, Seth Rogen as the eponymous alien). That same year, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol reminded us of his value in a supporting role.

But it's been kind of downhill for Pegg since 2012, in which he appeared in this weird thing that I still haven't seen (though I feel comfortable calling it "weird" sight unseen):

Twenty thirteen brought the second Star Trek movie, which was not as good as the first, and The World's End, which represented major diminishing returns within Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy (I like Hot Fuzz, but it's a big step down from Shaun of the Dead). I suspect I'm in the minority in my thoughts on The World's End, but that doesn't mean it informs my perspective any less.

But the current phase of Pegg's career, the one I find so troublesome, probably started in 2014. Since then, with a few prominent exceptions (among them the latest Mission: Impossible movie, which I also found to be a disappointment), Pegg has started going it alone as the main star of his own vehicles. Granted, I've only seen one of them, but I hated the one I saw:

As you will recall me discussing here.

Since the start of 2014 we have also gotten this:

And this:

And, of course, now this:

To be fair, any one of these movies could be great. I have it on good authority that Kill Me Three Times is awful, but even so, it could be great. (I don't always agree with that good authority.)

The point is, Pegg's choices and career trajectory have now poisoned me against him. A guy I once considered a surefire way to get some reliable chuckles and a good dose of heart can now reliably deliver me neither.

There's definitely some judging a book by its cover here. These have not been particularly high-profile movies, though each has a co-star or two that potentially interests me. (In fact, after In a World ..., I'm as high on Lake Bell as you can probably be.) And Nicolas Cage has surely made twice as many paycheck movies in the same time that Pegg has made this comparatively modest number of anonymous pseudo comedies.

But I don't want to be comparing Simon Pegg to Nicolas Cage, and the fact of the matter is, that's what I'm doing.

So will any of these movies bring me back around on Pegg? Because I want to be brought back around. Really I do.

If you've seen any and care to let me know, please do so in the comments. There's a Simon Pegg out there I love ... I just want to find him again.

Tiresome tropes: The jabbering coward

I finally caught Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation this week after it had been theaters for nearly a month, and was disappointed by how rote it was. The plot was rote, the dialogue was rote, the characters were rote, even the action set pieces had a certain roteness within their predominating spectacularness. That is to say, they were sort of spectacular, but they were also sort of rote. However, I suppose they were also enough for me to give the movie a marginally positive review.

One of its easiest disappointing aspects to point out was one it shares with most movies of its kind, and even many that are not of its kind. Namely, there has to be some jabbering, blubbering, more cowardly side character alongside the hero, disgorging improbable amounts of nervous, very specific dialogue, even during scenes where the sheer physical circumstances of their predicament would make such verbose nattering highly unlikely.

I'm calling this guy "the jabbering coward," and in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, that thankless role was played by Simon Pegg.

Pegg's Benji probably did the same in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, but since I liked that movie much better than this one, I didn't notice it (or don't remember, if I did). After all, he's the comic relief. After all, this is what he does.

The problem with this trope, which appears in almost every movie where there is some kind of buddy dynamic (though the traits can definitely be underplayed, which is a relief), is that the character is not really a coward. In fact, more often than not, this character is about 90% as courageous as the hero, which is a bravery ratio that holds up for Benji and Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt as well.

But strap that guy into a car being driven maniacally through the streets, and all the sudden he'll piss his pants over things that aren't a tenth as threatening as much of what he's just been through.

Perfect case in point, and there are some mild Rogue Nation spoilers to follow if you want to look away.

The notable thing about the scene screen-captured above is that it's one big set piece immediately coming on the heels of another, bigger set piece. For the sake of shorthand, we'll call them "underwater computer" and "car chase turns into motorcycle chase," because really, aren't the set pieces, and their very ability to be distilled down to these short descriptions, the reason for even making this movie in the first place? (And the fact that Cruise is going to do all his own stunts in these set pieces?) Anyway, in "underwater computer," Benji is placing himself in harm's way based on the extremely unlikely prospect that Ethan will disarm some extremely intricate and improbable security system. If Ethan fails -- and there is about a 99.6% chance that he actually will fail -- then Benji will be killed at worst, or never again see the light of day while being tortured round the clock at best. With these kind of odds, this is where Benji should be a sniffling, sniveling mess.

Yet Benji walks through that scenario coolly and collectedly, as he needs to do in order to emerge from it unsuspected. Good on ya, Benji. We wouldn't have expected anything less of you.

Until the movie tells us five minutes later to expect far, far less.

No sooner have all involved emerged (improbably) alive from "underwater computer" than they are thrust into "car chase turns into motorcycle chase." The joke is that Hunt has nearly drowned, so his ability to drive a car should be limited at best -- after all, he's responding erratically to tests of his mental acuity, and he can barely even stand. Yet The Indestructible Ethan Hunt does jump into the driver's seat, perhaps because driving is his forte and it is, um, decidedly not Benji's. That leaves Benji flailing about in the passenger seat, unleashing a stream of steady cautions and expulsions of sheer terror.

Which is really funny, because you figure Benji had probably already been through "car chase turns into motorcycle chase" at least four or five times before, but had likely never experienced an "underwater computer."

If you want to drill down deep and try to discover an actual explanation for this, you might say it's the looming threat of actual physical harm that really scares Benji. In "underwater computer," the threat is far more abstract, so there's no physical stimulus to cause him to shit his pants. Or maybe you could say that he's all the more eager to brown those boxers precisely because he's been holding in his fear for so long during "underwater computer." "Car chase turns into motorcycle chase" is, therefore, a release for him -- a release of tension, a release of bodily fluids, what have you.

But I'm not looking for a logical explanation, because neither is the script. The script is just looking for someone to provide a motormouth running commentary as a car in which he's riding is careening out of control. The script is just looking, for some reason, for someone to provide additional contrast with Cruise, to again show us just how badass Cruise is. It's not enough that he's doing his own stunts, and that "car chase turns into motorcycle chase" is only about the fourth most potentially fatal thing his character (or the actor) has done in this movie. The script has to eradicate that tiny remaining kernel of uncertainty of just how brave Ethan Hunt is by having someone sitting next to him turn into a blubbering mess, just to underscore how grave their situation is.

I say Benji deserves better, but so too does Pegg. Hasn't Pegg come far enough along in his career where he doesn't need to scream "Watch out!" every time Cruise drives through a piazza and is about to kill everyone in it, including the two of them?

I suppose in a way, it's a bit like a laugh track on a TV show. The laugh track is there to tell you when something's funny, and it doesn't have to be a bad thing. I mean, try imagining the classic Seinfeld without a laugh track. Sometimes, you just need it. If there wasn't some fool advertising his horror over what was going on, would we even know it was a dangerous situation? Well, we'd know -- but would we feel like something was missing?

If there's any positive news to the sad inescapability of this trend, it's that at least they're no longer casting actors of color to play this role. Or not as much, anyway. Used to be, the character prognosticating doom and gloom was the black character, and Hollywood thought it was balancing everything out by having this character behave heroically when really put to the test. Not realizing, of course, that it was a pernicious stereotype about black people who talk a lot that caused them to envision this actor in that role in the first place.

To all the Benjis out there, I say: Rise up! Free yourself from the shackles of the role you are required to play. Next time you're in a car and the driver seems a bit unstable, just realize you're in a movie and that you have been through far worse scrapes with this guy before. If you survived those, what makes you think your luck is about to run out now?

Or if you are scared -- as, let's face it, all of us would be -- my God, just keep it to yourself. Your unbecoming shrieking is only going to ruin the driver's concentration anyway, and then you really will crash.

The Spaced team faces its toughest challenge

Before they were the team of collaborators that brought us Shaun of the Dead, one of the most beloved zombie movies of all time, Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost collaborated on a little British TV show called Spaced. It was about a guy (Pegg) who'd been dumped by his girlfriend, who moves in with a different girl (Jessica Hynes) -- merely platonically, or so it starts. It's the story of their lives and the lives of their goofy neighbors and friends -- and it was funny as hell. My wife and I watched both seasons a couple years ago.

Of course, after Spaced and Shaun of the Dead, the trio collaborated on Hot Fuzz in 2007, again coming away with a decent-sized hit -- even though it runs on arguably a half-hour too long.

Their fourth collaboration -- or fifth, if you want to include Frost and Pegg participating in Wright's Grindhouse trailer, Don't -- comes out today. It's Paul, and it's one of those movies some of us tell people we want to see, even though we're not really sure we actually do want to see it.

As you probably know, Paul is a movie about an alien with the speech mannerisms of Seth Rogen -- because it's Seth Rogen doing the voice -- and the two dimwits who hook up with him, played by Pegg and Frost. If anyone else's names were on this movie other than Pegg, Frost and Wright, we'd be running from it at full speed. However, since it's them, we're willing to give it a shot.

I should say that Wright is only the executive producer of this film -- one of five -- and not its director. And here's where a big warning flag goes up for me. Paul is directed by Greg Mottola, who directed Superbad. For most people, this is a good thing -- in fact, the ad campaign focuses almost exclusively on the Superbad connection, not on anything the Spaced team has done. For me, however, I found Superbad overrated -- perhaps grossly overrated. I don't give it a thumbs down, but I'm pretty wary of it. I'm even more wary of the film Mottola made in between Superbad and Paul, which is Adventureland. It had some of the same tonal problems I detected in Superbad, only it made them a lot meaner. I do like Mottola's first film, The Daytrippers, but that was a lifetime ago, back in 1996.

However, I will say that the best part of Superbad was the cops behaving badly with their sidekick, McLovin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). One of those cops was played by Rogen, who does the voice of the title character here. But I think Rogen is on the downswing of his likability as a performer right now. He'd be there even if The Green Hornet hadn't been a disaster, but it was -- and probably the worst thing about it was how unlikable he was. Now, I liked Rogen voicing a monster in Monsters vs. Aliens. I just don't know if I'll like Rogen voicing an alien in Paul.

There's an X factor here that throws out of whack our ability to forecast the movie's quality. The fact that it was written by Pegg is not such a surprise -- he's been credited as a writer on all of his collaborations with Frost and Wright (he and Wright created Spaced together). However, this time Frost is also credited as a writer -- his first writing credit on a feature. My guess is that Pegg did most of the heavy lifting and threw his buddy a bone, but it's hard to say for sure. I'd be inclined to view their involvement with the script as a positive, but it's not quite so cut-and-dried as that. After all, Pegg also wrote the screenplay for Run Fat Boy Run, which I thought was loathsome. Maybe we can blame Michael Ian Black, who has the "story by" credit as well as a co-screenwriter credit, for that one.

Anyway you slice it, a movie about two stoners hanging out with a refugee from Area 51 is a tough sell -- or could be, anyway. You're relying on "smart stoners" to watch it -- intellectuals who like a good laugh (and like to toke up), who were really the ones who gave Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz their large cult followings. The problem with "smart stoners" is that they tend to call bullshit at a certain point. Whether Paul is an instance of that or not remains to be seen.

But not seen by me -- at least, not this weekend. I should be honest and say that I plan to devote much of my free time to watching college basketball this weekend. But even if I didn't, I'd see Limitless, not Paul.

So, why didn't I write about Limitless today? Simple: Couldn't think of anything to say. Sometimes, that's all that goes into it.