Run for Your Wife

I was lucky, or should i say unlucky enough to attend the premiere of this film. And after about 10 minutes it was clear to me that what was in front of me was nothing better than a high school film project. Every aspect of this film was appalling. The screenplay was horrific, containing the most crude and unfunny jokes imaginable. The acting was as bad; poor Danny Dyer did the best he could considering what he had to work with but the two wives, Sarah Harding and Denise Van Outen took acting to a new low. Ray Cooney's directional ineptitude was also clearly apparent however good a stage writer he may claim to be.

The 90 minutes I had to spend watching this was truly the most tiresome experience I have ever had in a cinema. The hocus pocus plot I'm sure drove most of the audience round the bend and I felt a great deal better when the credits started to role. Everyone who had anything to do with this film must be regretting being a part of this project. It seems that the only point of this film was to give has beens of British film and television a few seconds of screen time.

It is no surprise Run for your Wife took a grand total of £602 in its first week and is being heralded as the worst film of the year.

So bad that it's actually funny! Why didn't they think to stop producing after the first scene? Or even at the planning stage? Plot is very bad and I am surprised it even made the money it did. Danny Dyer wasn't bad but everyone else didn't suit their roles.

For me it has to be one of the worst film this century. Even the many guest cameo's couldn't save this from being terrible. If you get the chance to watch it though, you can't say no, more people need to know about this farce of a film. I hope it wins awards for being so poor.

Give it a re-brand with reviews like "So bad it will make you laugh" and this could be the next big thing.

Review: What a complete load of crap. The acting is terrible along with the storyline which was badly written with a appalling concept. This has to be Danny Dyer's worse film to date and all of the other actors should have stayed away from it. On the plus side, there are some familiar faces throughout the movie which people will remember when they were young, but apart from that, this is a massive waste of time. The pathetic situations that Danny Dyer finds himself in were unbelievable and very badly thought out. I think that you can tell that I REALLY hates this film,

Round-Up: I can't believe that someone got the budget for this film after reading the script, and to top it off, it looks like there considering a sequel, after seeing the end credits. This is also supposed to be Denise Van Outen's big break into movies, which was a bad idea. The thing that everyone should just put this movie behind them and try and come out with something decent.

Budget: £2.2million (Waste Of Money!) Worldwide Gross: N/A

I recommend this movie to people who like ridiculous comedies set around London. 1/10

The main problem with this film is that there are so many cameos. Ray Cooney seemed to invite everyone he knew in the world of stage and screen spanning the last 60 years! There are 141 cameos in total! They break up the pace of the film constantly.

I recently performed the stage version of this play, in both the UK and the US, with very receptive audiences who enjoyed it. The main thing was it stayed based in the 1980s as a period piece.

There are so many plot holes in this due to the film script not being updated enough. It's set in 2012, and people used mobile phones aplenty. Something this film forgets, and hopes the audience do.

Everything seemed to have been done on the first or second take. The level of acting on this is on par with a pantomime. With Christopher Biggins taking the accolade for most insufferable performance.

It doesn't help that John Smith played by Danny Dyer is so unlikeable as the main character that the audience is supposed to root for.

I laughed about 5 times in the whole film. Which is why it gets an extra star. What stops it from getting any more is the awful slapstick, puns, and actual pauses where they think the audience will be rolling around laughing. Where the only thing they'll actually be rolling is their eyes!

Especially in the age of the Internet, it can sometimes be hard as a viewer to give movies a fair shake. Sometimes the first or even only thing we might hear about a title is that it's very bad. If we're not dissuaded altogether from watching, then no matter how open-minded we may try to be that kernel of information will still be sitting with us if we take a chance. Nonetheless, as with all cinematic infamy - 'Showgirls,' 'Ishtar,' 'Cats,' and so on - there comes a point where reading about something just isn't enough, and we have to see it for ourselves. Though I've no familiarity with the play I'm aware that Ray Cooney's stage work has enjoyed considerable success over the years; on the other hand, I'm also aware that his film adaptation, co-directed with John Luton, has been the source of considerable derision from the moment it was released. But just how bad could it be? As soon as we press "play" we discover that the answer is "astoundingly." 'Run for your wife' is a chore from the moment it begins, and the only surprise is that it's not regarded even more poorly.

There is no line that is funny, even if some come close. There is no scene, characterization, or performance that is funny, no matter how desperately over the top Cooney or his actors try to make them - and I do mean "desperate," as in "they were leaning heavily on the pizazz in the vain hope that it would be a suitable substitute for wit or actual humor." These same words can be applied to many other aspects, including and not necessarily limited to music and sound cues, the overproduced image quality that accentuates the contrivance, the bright and pronounced colors in the sets, filming locations, costume design, and lighting that are amplified by that image quality, and every gag, quip, or trace of physical comedy or situational humor. This feature looks like, sounds like, and is just about as funny as the average Asylum production, with a rank veneer of falsehood that dampens all the fun we should theoretically be having. Even Walter Mair's music is stunningly milquetoast, like something a local business would commission for an ad parodying a well known movie.

I don't know what happened here. What's flummoxing is that I've seen one of Cooney's other directed features, 1973's 'Not now, darling,' and absolutely loved it; it was riotously funny all the way through. The man clearly is not an amateur nobody, and I do recognize scattered ideas here that could and should have earned a laugh. What was it about 'Run for your wife' that it found such success on the stage, but immediately floundered when Cooney tried to adapt it as a motion picture? Is it that he couldn't capture the right energy? Is Cooney's direction too flat? Is there too weak a sense of dynamics? Are the dynamics too severe? Are the jokes too juvenile, is the comedic timing off, does the farce of the theater not comport with the farce of cinema? Has the comedy of the 80s not aged well, or did Cooney overcompensate in updating his 80s play to the 2010s? In the very least the former is definitely true where the gay community is the butt of an ill-considered joke, which is the case with increasing frequency as the length advances. Amazingly, 'Run for your wife' somehow manages to get even worse in the last third when the would-be "comedy" furthermore resorts to transphobia to reach in futility for cheap, puerile giggles.

I'm not even sure what some bits were supposed to represent, or how we got from A to B in some cases, or how they were supposed to be funny; the writing is a jumbled mess. I don't have the answers here; all I know is that I never laughed once in ninety minutes, and the strongest reaction that the flick evoked was a smile. Or, to be fair, it was a handful of smiles - but no more than five total by my count, and at least one of those felt like a forced prize offered in consolation for how frantic all involved seemed to be to gain some infinitesimal sliver of favor. Rarely has one and one-half hours felt so excruciatingly long; the digital timer inched forward with agonizing slothfulness. With all this firmly in mind, the large number of "blink and you miss them" celebrity cameos feels like an urgent last ditch effort by Cooney, Luton, and producers Graham Fowler and James Simpson to distract audiences from how unbelievably, atrociously hollow, vapid, insipid, and unfunny the whole affair is. I don't know whether to feel embarrassed for those who contributed in some manner, or to condemn them.

A small part of me wants to say this doesn't completely hit rock bottom. Though the ends to which they were guided are abysmal, the cast endeavored mightily; likewise, the turned in good work, even if it was twisted to terrible ends. Yet the fact remains that even through to a post-credits scene, this abomination only ever manages to get worse, and go from tiresome to exhausting to actively aggravating. I'm sure there is someone out there who does think it's entertaining, but I don't know who they are, and I don't think I want to know them, either. I anticipated that 'Run for your wife' would be awful, and still I'm confounded by just how egregiously stale and meaningless it is, and in some instances downright offensive. Frankly, I'm simply aghast. For all the movies that have ever been described as being one of "the worst ever made," those that truly deserve the label are often ones that a negligible number of people have ever seen - 'A karate Christmas miracle,' for example, or 'Birdemic.' Well, mark this 2012 title as an example of a major release that can count among that notorious company, because when all is said and done, this is pretty much just appalling.