British comedy actor Simon Pegg worried me last year with his first major starring role outside of his Edgar Wright/Nick Frost team with Run, Fatboy, Run - a movie so incredibly unfunny and stupid that it was 2 hours of pain watching Pegg take the material seriously.

For actors like Pegg, much like Ricky Gervais - it takes a special kind of role and clever writing material to really use them at their best because they are comedians first and not actors. I find it pretty interesting that both men are playing similar roles in American produced movies at around the same time and they both fall down to the same problem.

With straight characters… Pegg and Gervais are not the leading man, or shouldn’t be.

Here’s the trailer for Pegg’s second attempt at this, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People which similarly to Run, Fatboy, Run descends into a kind of gag so over-used, so wretchedly banal and so bottom of the barrel, it’s impossible to not cringe. It’s the spit the food on the lady gag!

SEE IT IN HD HERE

Simon Pegg should not try and be the British version of Adam Sandler. He is way better than that and to many movies like this, people will soon get sick of him.

From Curb Your Enthusiasm director Robert B. Weide and adapted to the screen by Peter Straughn (Sixty Six), the movie is based on the real life memoirs of British journalist/critic Toby Young who struggled to fit in when he went Stateside to work for Vanity Fair. It’s basically a guy’s version of The Devil Wears Prada.

Kirsten Dunst plays Pegg’s love interest, Jeff Bridges his boss, Danny Huston his co-worker and Megan Fox plays a parody of herself as a dumb American actress. The movie opens in the U.S. and U.K. on October 3rd and looks awful.

source - coming soon