[7.3/10] When sketch groups decide to make movies, they often run into one of two problems. Either the movie feels like a single sketch, stretched out to cinematic length without enough incident or comic material to fill in the gaps, or it feels like a bunch of sketches loosely tied together with a paper-thin narrative. So I was apprehensive about *Run Ronnie Run*, the first film outing for the creative team behind the cult classic sketch program *Mr. Show*.

In some ways, I needn’t have been. There’s times when *Run Ronnie Run* does play like a feature length version of *Mr. Show*’s first Ronnie Dobbs sketch, which ran in its very first episode. Truth be told, I wasn’t a big fan of the sketch, or of Dobbs as a comic presence (he was one of the series’ very few recurring characters). Like much of even the best of *Mr. Show*, it often felt like a funny premise and good set of gags stretched too thin.

And yet, *Run Ronnie Run* isn’t necessarily the worst for taking an idea that struggled a bit at seven minutes and taking it out to ninety. Part of what separated *Mr. Show* from its peers was that good or bad, the series’s sketches tended to have a genuine beginning, middle, and end, and the types of escalation and progression that made them feel like true, if abbreviated stories, rather than just thin excuses for the writers/performers to spin gags.

So the film version shares the same basic premise and trajectory of its skit-based forebear. Ronnie Dobbs (David Cross) is a redneck townie in the heartland who’s never accomplished much in his life. He meets a wannabe filmmaker/promoter Terry Twillstein (Bob Odenkirk), who gives him a chance at stardom by starting a T.V. show that features Dobbs being arrested all around the country a la *COPS*. And once Dobbs has his taste of fortune and fame, he loses the genuineness and strange sort of personal integrity that gained him the notoriety in the first place.

Right out of the box, that has all the makings of a nice showbiz satire, and even a broader spoof on standard “rise and fall” narratives that works as a commentary on what our society becomes fascinated with and eventually rejects. Maybe that’s too much to put on a skit and a film about a drunk, half-naked idiot running from the cops, but like a lot of *Mr. Show* and its spin-offs and comic offspring, there’s more going under the hood there than you might think at first blush which gives *Run Ronnie Run* some juice.

The movie also fleshes out Ronnie Dobbs and Terry Twillstein enough to make them characters who can sustain a feature film and not just just a premium cable gag-fest. They’re each given clear motivations. Ronnie wants to make something of himself, at the insistence of Tammy -- his three-time ex-wife and the mother of his kids -- so that she’ll marry him again. And Twillstein has seen failure after failure with his “Thrilling Miracles” line of infomercial products (another *Mr. Show* call back), but sees in Dobbs (who’s become a viral sensation), the chance for success that’s so eluded him.

It’s pretty standard studio comedy stuff in terms of the “what do they want?” question that every writer should ask about their characters -- love and success -- but it’s enough to fuel each of their quests and add some stakes, however slight, to the events of the film. Say what you will about the madcap insanity that was the tone of *Mr. Show*, but it was a series that, beneath the madness, understood the power of structure and character and how it could give shape to the comedy in ways that were often under the audience’s notice but made the proceedings stronger.

In some ways, *Run Ronnie Run* is a little more conventional than you’d expect from the humor braintrust headed by Odenkirk and Cross. There’s a one-note (if comically exaggerated villain), a love interest, and even the hint of a Campbell-esque (or given this group’s affiliation with Dino Stamatopoulos, Harmon-esque), hero’s journey here. But despite lifting characters and gags from their sketches, it plays like an actual movie, which is something of an accomplishment in and of itself.

The problem is that once the film reaches a little past the halfway mark of its story arc, where after overcoming hurdles personal and professional, Ronnie and Terry become successes -- the movie starts to run into steam and spin out into disconnected skits, the kind that make the movie feel occasionally like more of an effort to use the film as a trojan horse to do more *Mr. Show*-esque riffs than to keep up the comic or narrative momentum of the film’s central premise.

I enjoy Three Times One Minus One (Bob and David’s R&B parody) as much as the next guy, but it doesn't really have a place here. It’s a treat to see Patrick Warburton as the head of a “gay conspiracy,” but you could cut that sequence from the film, or drop it in as a sketch in a random *Mr. Show* episode, and neither would be the lesser. And although here in 2018, *Run Ronnie Run* is one long “Hey, it’s that guy!” set of celeb-spotting, the nigh-endless parade of Bob and David’s famous friends gets tiresome and indulgent at some points. (Though call me a hypocrite, because I loved seeing Mandy Patinkin call back to Ronnie’s second appearance on *Mr. Show*.

The comedy also waxes and wanes throughout the flick. This crew’s sensibility always veered a bit toward the juvenile and edgy, but *Run Ronnie Run* often goes for shallow double entendres or the scatalogical for the sake of scatalogical without one of the trademark twists or subversions that made Bob and David’s prior (and future) work more than just a bunch of jokes that were only supposed to be funny because you’d get in trouble for telling them in middle school. The worst offender on this front is the running gag of Ronnie’s friend Clay (David Koechner) getting progressively more injured with each new appearance, though at least that had a characteristic out there turn in the end.

And while there’s a bit of elegance to the intra-reality T.V. show fight that spurs the third act action sequence, it comes off dated today, and smacks of the need for escalation and fireworks to conclude a movie that doesn't otherwise know how to stick the landing when you can’t just transition to another sketch. There’s setups and payoffs galore (as befits a movie from Bob and David’s crew), and a winking sort of humor to the climax that clicks when it needs to, but when Ronnie loses direction after achieving his fame, the movie does too, and it never really recovers.

When *Run Ronnie Run* is devoted to telling its main character’s story in appropriately comic tone, it is a surprising delight for something that began as a seven-minute scene of a shirtless David Cross evading cops while Bob Odenkirk narrated in an acknowledged bad British accent. The bones of that sketch make for a thoroughly enjoyable and amusing, if a little staid, feature film-worthy story. But when the film stalls out and devolves into random, hit-or-miss sketches, or has to try to build that reasonable simple rise and fall into a climatic conflict, it stumbles into the same pitfalls that have felled any number of *SNL* character vehicles, the likes of which Bob and David always meant to be an alternative to.