Hit & Run

Review by Matt Finley

Dax Shepard really likes fast cars. He likes talking about fast cars, driving fast cars, and he loves filming himself talking about fast cars while driving them. Whether these pre-occupations warrant a feature-length action comedy I guess depends on how much you, the viewer, like watching Dax Shepard doing these things.

HIT & RUN, which Shepard wrote himself and co-directed with David Palmer (with whom he worked on 2010’s BROTHER JUSTICE), is a strange movie. I won’t say it’s quite the cinematic equivalent of someone waving at their mom from a merry-go-round… but it’s close. Shepard performed most of his own driving stunts, cast a crew of Hollywood buds plus his spouse – the button-cute Kristen Bell - and uses the narrative as much to grocery list and riff through his own comedic and cultural fixations as he does to tell an engaging filmic story.  

Brother's Justice (now on video)

[BROTHER'S JUSTICE is now available on home video.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Even though meta-satire TV comedies like Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Larry Sanders Show, Entourage, Extras etc. have done the idea to death, BROTHER'S JUSTICE is another one of those mockumentary-type deals in which real-life movie-industry folk portray themselves, generally as ego-swollen jerkwads. Just kidding, right. Uh, right? 

In a setup that seems to be a takeoff on Joaquin Phoenix's bizarre career turnabouts, comic actor Dax Shepard (Dax Shepard, portraying himself as a borderline racist/homophobe with a soupcon of substance-abuse issues) announces he's going to forsake funny business and become a dead-serious martial-arts action star, a la Chuck Norris, in something called "Brother's Justice." There isn't even a script, just a vague Dax-centric scenario pitch about drug-dealing biker gangs and a kidnapped brother. Shepard doesn't even know any martial-arts skills. But he bulldozes ahead with the thing and brings aboard his lifelong buddy Nate Tuck (Nate Tuck), normally a Kinko's manager, to produce. There's a funny between-the-lines subtext that Shepard's been mooching off Tuck in one form or another for ages, including pooling their finances to buy Shepard a cool car for a racetrack documentary that never got underway.