Even Simon Pegg can’t save unfunny ‘Fantastic Fear’
Mini-review: ‘A Fantastic Fear of Everything’
Simon Pegg is a very talented comic actor, but you would never guess that in this claustrophobic, strained stream-of-consciousness, sinking cinematic showboat.
Pegg plays a former children’s novelist-turned-crime novelist. Now obsessed with researching Victorian serial killers, Pegg’s paranoid nut job prances in his undershorts while hiding out in his junked-up London apartment, holding a knife and waiting with Norman Bated breath for Jack the Ripper to arrive at his door.
Too late. The Ripper has already killed writer/director Crispin Mills’ movie by surgically removing its wit and funny bone, leaving behind a thin and excruciating lengthy comic corpse that doesn’t know Jack.
“A Fantastic Fear of Everything” opens at the Logan, Chicago. Rated R for language. 141 minutes. ½ star