I don't often get the desire to walk out of a film, but the thought did cross my mind several times during a dull, tedious first act which consists of Simon Pegg mugging around his dark, dingy flat in nothing but a pair of soiled underpants. This feeling was exacerbated by the fact that 90% of the story and exposition is explained through a terrible VoiceOver/inner monologue from Pegg's character. In Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman's character goes to a screenwriting seminar by Robert McKee who says "...and God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character."
Relying so heavily on this technique exposes the many underlying flaws in the rest of the film, chiefly being an inability to decide what type of film it really wants to be.
The casting of Simon Pegg in the lead role would suggest that it is a comedy. However in order for a film to be a comedy, it has to be funny. And it certainly isn't.
Then, perhaps, it is a pychological horror examining the mental breakdown of a paranoid man possibly being stalked by a killer. No, it would have to be scary for that to be true and the only frightening thing about it is that it has reached an audience at all.
It is only by the inclusion of a couple of weird animated sequences that we get a sense that director/screenwriter Crispian Mills wanted to create something in the style of the Mighty Boosh and Paul King (the director of Bunny and the Bull), but he has come up woefully short. I think it is fair to say that Mills won't be joining mother Hayley and grandfather John in the ranks of cinematic greats anytime soon and, as for Pegg, probably best to beam up to the Enterprise, quicken his journey to World's End and try to forget this film ever happened... I know I will!
