Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #200 Run, Ronnie, Run (2002)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone. 

Thanks to your generosity and support, this most important of columns has officially reached its two hundredth entry. That’s a lot! I have watched a whole lot of weird and bad and sometimes wonderful movies at your behest and I wanted the two hundredth film I wrote about for this column to be special. 

I thought about doing the director’s cut of The Southland Tales for the milestone entry, since I’m obsessed with that movie and missed out on an opportunity to write its liner notes due to a combination of poor communication and a lack of hustle. 

I also contemplated writing about the next entry in my patron-funded exploration of the films and television projects of Tawny Kitaen, 1994’s Hercules in the Underworld, in tribute to Kitaen upon her recent passing at 59 but technical snafus made that impossible. 

So I decided to write about a silly movie that taught me never to become emotionally invested in anything, because the deeper the investment, the more agonizing and unbearable the pain when things inevitably go awry. 

I’m talking about a movie that taught me that hope and optimism are for suckers and that the only way to function in life  is to harden your heart and accept that everything you love will disappoint you and everything you believe in will let you down. 

I’m referring of course to the poorly received Mr. Show spin-off Run, Ronnie, Run, which was filmed in 2001, premiered at Sundance in 2002 and was released direct to video in 2003 in a haze of bad buzz and bad publicity involving co-writers and stars David Cross and Bob Odenkirk falling out with director Troy Miller and disowning his cut of the movie. 

At the time Run, Ronnie, Run was green-lit I may have been more emotionally invested in Mr. Show than the people who actually made it. When I think back of my eighteen years working for Onion Inc, the comedy and entertainment writers’ cult-like reverence for Mr. Show is one of my biggest, happiest memories. 

We were obsessed with Mr. Show. We watched every episode. We quoted it constantly. It felt like a show that was created specifically for us. So when we discovered that it would be making the big leap to the big screen we couldn’t imagine it being anything other than a triumph. 

How could people as inherently, explosively funny as Bob and David make a movie that wasn’t funny? Then again, I felt the same way about The Onion Movie. I was convinced that once it was a huge hit my life and the lives of my coworkers would change forever and my job would become less personal and less special once the whole world embraced The Onion. 

That ended up happening but it had nothing to do with The Onion Movie. At this point point in my long, intense, bittersweet relationship with Run, Ronnie, Run I have gone through the Kübler-Ross model’s five stages of grief.

I started with denial. Run, Ronnie, Run wasn’t so bad! It has some great stuff! It just didn’t get a chance. I moved on to anger. Why wouldn’t the stupid studio let Bob and David be funny? Why were they sabotaged and undermined instead of supported? Then came bargaining. Maybe if the studio let them do their own cut the film could be salvaged! Who did I need to bribe to make that happen? Then it was on to depression. Run, Ronnie, Run did suck! It had so much potential and squandered nearly all of it! Finally, I reached the stage of acceptance, which is essentially a more zen version of depression: Run, Ronnie, Run is not a good movie and that’s okay. 

Run, Ronnie, Run opens with an animated parody of pre-show cartoons where sentient theater food parades about merrily for the amusement of hungry, thirsty patrons. The opening bit takes the anthropomorphic nature of these happy tubs of popcorn, boxes of candy and cups of ice-cold cola to extremes both comic and scatological when a box of Junior Mints goes relieves itself in a toilet that turns out to also be anthropomorphic, to the point of sitting in between our hero and his date. 

It’s reasonably sly commentary on the arbitrary nature of the way we anthropomorphize some things but not others that’s smarter and quirkier than what’s to follow but it’s worth noting that even this standout sequence is LITERALLY toilet humor involving a LITERAL toilet and various secretions. 

This is followed by another stand-alone bit of mildly inspired nonsense, in this case a gentlemanly figure introducing himself as the “valedictorian of television” and informing us that what we’re about to see is not real so consequently, “Do not act things out from it because you are disturbed or pissed off, you crazy son of a bitch.” 

It’s one of many moments throughout the film when Run, Ronnie, Run seems to be trying to escape itself, to flee the futility of being a major motion picture devoted to a brutally unfunny, one-note hillbilly joke like Ronnie Dobbs.

The core problem of Run, Ronnie, Run is that it needs us to see its title character simultaneously as a mean-spirited figure of glib ridicule, a stupid redneck clown in a bad mullet wig perpetually up to drunken hillbilly criminal shenanigans and a lovable true romantic with a heart of gold. 

Run, Ronnie, Run wants us to laugh at Ronnie AND be emotionally invested in his happiness. It wants us to look beyond his rough edges and gratuitous use of the word “bitch” and also the fact that he’s a career criminal and completely unlikable, charmless caricature and LOVE Ronnie Dobbs. 

That Run, Ronnie, Run is not successful in getting audiences to love Ronnie Dobbs is not surprising. That it’s equally incapable of getting us to laugh at him as well is more surprising and ultimately fatal to a comedy that just wants to make you laugh and succeeds a distressingly tiny percentage of the time. 

To further distance us from the proceedings it’s narrated in gleefully verbose explosions of hillbilly verbiage by David Koechner, who stands out as someone for whom doing hillbilly shtick come effortlessly, from an organic, honest place deep within his soul. 

The same is not true of Cross, whose understandable contempt for Ronnie is apparent even during the film’s many unfortunate attempts to humanize him. If the actor playing Ronnie Dobbs doesn’t like him, why should we? That wouldn’t be a problem if the movie weren’t so regrettably intent on getting us to care about this hateful rube’s spiritual and emotional growth. 

Run, Ronnie, Run’s other fatal flaw is that Ronnie and his limey star-maker made the leap from three minute television sketch to three-act feature film without developing any additional layers or depth. 

They’re consequently as ill-equipped to carry a major motion picture as the moon-lighting recurring characters in the most desperate, least inspired Saturday Night Live film adaptations. 

#Squadgoals

Ronnie begins the film an implausibly beloved figure in a shitty backwaters small town in Georgia, not far from where I currently live, actually, where he is known far and wide for criminal mischief and wild tales and hated by a politically ambitious sheriff played by M.C Gainey in a plot development that, like every other aspect of the plot, serves no purpose and should have ended up on the cutting room floor. 

Ronnie’s idiot-savant charisma attracts the attention of disgraced infomercial pitch-man Terry Twillstein (Bob Odenkirk). The intensely British television personality sees in Dobbs’ tragicomic attempts to get himself out of various legal scrapes an opportunity to reinvent himself as a reality show maven. 

He decides to pitch a show where Dobbs will get arrested in ways that are supposed to be funny and surprising and sometimes heartwarming but always entertaining. 

Is there a love story greater than that of Ronnie Dobbs and the mother of his many children?

In my fuzzy imagination, I vaguely recalled Odenkirk’s character being effete in a harmlessly British fashion. I did not remember that there are moments in Run, Ronnie, Run when it goes so hard on gay panic jokes and crude double entendres that it borders on “Flirty Harry” territory. 

Flirty Harry was of course the screamingly gay, flamboyant Dirty Harry parody Adrien Brody played in Vince Offer’s 2013 bomb Inappropriate Comedy, which was a low point both for Brody as an actor and humanity as a whole. 

Terry tries to sell himself to Ronnie as a star-maker and collaborator with overtures that all sound sexual in nature. He tells him, “You’ve got something special, and I want it badly”, “I want to be the man BEHIND the man”, “I realize I’m coming all over you here but it’s been BUILDING up inside me for weeks!”, “Listen, sir, let me show you what you’ve got inside of you, what could be inside of you if you’d just give me the tiniest HOLE of opportunity” and finally, “We can go back to your place right now! I’ll pack your shit!”  

No.

Despite all of Terry’s arguments sounding suspiciously like gay come-ons, Ronnie takes a chance and heads to L.A, to the tunes of “Wacky” Mal Yankovic’s “I Love L.A” parody “I Loathe L.A”, which sounds disconcertingly like “I Hate L.A”, the “I Love L.A” parody in Sham-Wow pitchman turned cinematic sketch maven Offer’s The Underground Sketch Comedy Movie. 

Needless to say, it is not a positive development that the work of Cross and Odenkirk, two of the greatest sketch comedy performers and writers of all-time, overlaps here more than once with the awful oeuvre of the intensely talentless Offer, the least talented and respected man in sketch comedy and entertainment.

Over the course of way too many montage sequences Ronnie becomes the toast of Hollywood. He’s living large but, in a development no one could possibly care about, it comes at a steep moral cost. 

This reminds me of the curious professional trajectory of Danielle Bregoli, a teenager who was able to leverage being iconically, unforgettably obnoxious during an appearance on Dr. Phil into a lucrative rap career being iconically, unforgettably obnoxious on record, videos and her Onlyfans account as Bhad Bhabie. This should lend Run, Ronnie, Run an air of prescience but the raunchy flop never aspires to satire or social commentary so it feels just as empty now as it did back when reality television had not yet conquered and corrupted the world.

Ronnie was so concerned with wealth and fame and living the high life among the beautiful people that he forgot what really matters in life: being a good partner to Tammy (the wonderful Jill Talley, wasted in a largely thankless, joke-less role), the long-suffering mother of his many children, and a good father to his brood. 

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Alas, Ronnie tosses around the word “bitch” way too liberally and indiscriminately to be likable on any level despite the film’s disingenuous and smarmy insistence that underneath his cartoonishly dense, deluded exterior lies a good man who just went down a bad road. 

Odenkirk and Cross were understandably of the mindset that a Mr. Show movie about the nonsensical antics of a dumb hillbilly and his British Svengali should be funny above all else but director Troy Miller tragically felt that Run, Ronnie, Run should have “heart” as well as humor, that it should pluck at the heartstrings in addition to tickling funny bones. 

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

He was wrong. Oh god was he ever wrong. Miller’s bizarre delusion that people should be touched by the story of Ronnie Dobbs results in a movie divided against itself, with a weirdly earnest love story sucking the air out of the comedy and comedy that’s way cruder than the more cerebral variety found on Mr. Show. 

As it lurches to a close Run, Ronnie, Run gives itself over to random stupidity like a scene where an overweight child beats up the cannibalistic cast (that includes R. Lee Ermey and Mr. Show writer and occasional bit player Scott Aukerman, who also co-wrote the screenplay) of a Survivor parody using moves he learned from video games to the accompaniment of a song about how weird it is for someone seemingly out of shape to be such a skilled fighter. As a throwaway gig, it would whiff hard. As THREE FULL MINUTES of a seventy-eight minute movie, its inclusion feels bizarre and mildly sadistic.

That said, Run, Ronnie, Run is not entirely without redeeming facets. A scene where Mandy Patinkin portrays Ronnie Dobbs on Broadway and sings, in an achingly sad, tender voice, a song articulating his existential angst and battered dignity, is laugh out loud funny but also genuinely beautiful and oddly touching. 

Unfortunately those moments are the exception that prove the rule. There’s simply nothing to the relationship between Ronnie and Terry beyond a lot of weird tension and gay panic jokes. There’s nothing to the characters separately, either. 

Odenkirk and Cross have created so much wonderful comedy over the years. It’s deeply unfortunate, if not exactly tragic, that they chose such unworthy, maddeningly limited characters for a big screen close-up. 

A movie I couldn’t conceive of being anything other than a triumph for the ages was cursed to live and die as a painful, protracted post-script to the triumph of Mr. Show. The movie was doomed to an unhappy ending as a direct-to-video flop with apologists and defenders rather than fans. 

At the time the movie’s failure seemed somehow final and decisive, like it would haunt everyone involved and keep them from being successful. 

Can’t a man not crudely like and scream?

Thankfully that was not the case. As important and influential as Mr. Show was, and remains, it could certainly be argued that the creative minds behind the show and Run, Ronnie, Run did indeed go on to bigger and better things. David Cross went on to greater fame as a cast-member of Arrested Development and has quietly wracked up an impressive film career that includes The Cable Guy, Waiting for Guffman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Men in Black, Small Soldiers, Ghost World, I’m Not There, Kung Fu Panda, It’s a Disaster, Obvious Child, The Post and Sorry to Bother You. 

Run, Ronnie, Run may not be “good” or “funny” but it does have Nikki Cox in a bikini, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Odenkirk has arguably done even better, re-inventing himself as a powerful character actor in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and following the one-two-three disasters of Run, Ronnie, Run, The Brothers Solomon and Let’s Go to Prison with acclaimed performances in Nebraska and Little Women. 

Oh, and because the world is a weird and wonderful place, the fifty-eight year old comic genius and master of sketch comedy is now also an action hero thanks to his well-received new revenge drama Nobody. 

Scott Aukerman rebounded to become one of the preeminent architects of podcast comedy and the mind behind Between Two Ferns and the television and podcast versions of Comedy Bang! Bang! 

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Bob and David seem to have come to peace with Run, Ronnie, Run and accepted its creative as well as commercial failure. It’s time for us disappointed fans to do the same as well. 

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