Dax Shepard Continues Cold Streak With HIT AND RUN

• Tweet
• Pin It

I want to like Dax Shepard, I do.  He’s a charming, talented guy who also seems pretty down-to-earth and cool.  But the bad news is he’s never done anything I’ve liked.  And if the trailer for his new film Hit and Run is anything to go by, that’s not going to change any time soon.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Bradley Cooper in dreadlocks?  That’s the best you got for me over here?  Cooper’s another one I wanna like more, and as a matter of fact, I really enjoyed his work in Joe Carnahan’s The A-Team.  But sheesh, when are we as a nation going to quit demanding white guys trying to be black as an integral part of comedy?  I don’t think anyone’s ever going to top Gene Wilder in Silver Streak anyway, and that was almost forty years ago.

Shepard wrote this film starring himself as a former getaway driver named Charlie Bronson (dude, seriously?) who goes into witness protection after a big job.  But then his girlfriend (played by his real-life fiancée Kristen Bell) goes into labor just as his former cronies find him in Los Angeles.  So then a lot of Dukes of Hazzard-y car chases and collision courses with wackiness ensue.  Shepard also co-directed the film with David Palmer, the two re-teaming after 2010′s Brother’s Justice (which actually sounds quite interesting in a meta-fictional sort of way).

In fact, having watched the trailer for Brother’s Justice, I would recommend that you track that down and watch it rather than go see Hit and Run in the theaters:

For you big Dax fans out there (I’m assuming there’s more than a few), before you start writing in with your impassioned defenses of the man and his work, please consider this: a) I don’t care what you think.  I know people say that all the time, but I really don’t.  b) I will again say I want to like the guy’s stuff, but after Employee of the Month and Let’s Go to Prison, it’s hard for me to get behind any of his other projects.

But if you must, Hit and Run will hit theaters August 22nd, and then likely run from them by September 1st or so.