Hit And Run

Indian Express Rating: ***

It’s rare for a film to have actual conversations that begin and get somewhere. It’s even rarer for these conversations to happen between a former criminal and his angry girlfriend,and rarest perhaps for it to involve robbers with guns between them.

Television star Dax Shepard manages that,both shepherding the film as its main actor and as its co-director.

The curiously titled Hit and Run surprises you with how its characters talk at the unlikeliest of places and how it etches out each one of its characters,even the two cops in a patrol car,who barely have a few minutes on screen,split many ways.

It begins with Shepard as Charles Bronson talking to Randy (Arnold),the Marshall guarding him under a “witness protection programme”,about his tendency to shoot away with his firearms. It’s a talk with real warmth and concern,devoid of any sarcasm at Randy’s obvious ineptitude.

His girlfriend Annie (Bell) is the other person Charles is closest to. When Annie,who has a doctorate in “non-violent conflict resolution”,gets a job interview at UCLA,he decides to go to Los Angeles despite the trouble he may encounter in moving back to his old city. As Charles is found out by his ex-gang members whom he ratted out over a bank robbery,Annie starts discovering things about him she didn’t know.

However,rather than recrimination,this discovery is more an attempt to get to understand the other person. They argue about everything — from use of words to use of violence and debate,compromise.

Annie’s ex-boyfriend Gail (Rosenbaum) is mildly crazy but only because he loves her while Cooper plays Charles’s former gang member Dmitri who is out for revenge. Dmitri’s biggest grouse,however,is not the deception but that he was raped while in lock-up. To which,Charles and Dmitri have this long conversation about the race of the person who did it. The encapsulation of racial prejudices in that exchange is hilarious in the same way as this film is smart — in really talking when it talks.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com