Hit & Run (2012)

Hit & Run arrives from 2012, a year when the action comedy still believed it could get by on a souped-up Lincoln and the sight of Tom Arnold discharging a firearm in the general vicinity of his own van. Dax Shepard writes, co-directs and stars as Charlie Bronson, a former getaway driver in witness protection who jeopardizes his new identity to drive his girlfriend Annie to a job interview at UCLA. Annie holds a doctorate in Non-Violent Conflict Resolution. This is the film's lone concession to the modern sensibility, and it is deployed mostly as a punchline. Roger Ebert liked it. Richard Roeper gave it an F. Both responses are defensible.

The progressive content here is thin and arrives late. A U.S. Marshal and a small-town police officer, having spent the picture in pursuit, drift into a same-sex relationship during the closing minutes, acknowledged with a shrug and a shared exam. It is a gesture, not a thesis, and the film treats it as one more loose end to tie off. Annie's academic specialty supplies a few lines of mediation advice during a hostage negotiation, all of it played for comedy. The film has no interest in lecturing us about anything, which is either a relief or a void, depending on taste.

What we do not find is equally instructive. There is no racial commentary, no environmental anxiety, no critique of the wealthy, no body-positivity thread, no neurodivergent character, no rewriting of history. The bank robberies are a plot device, not a political statement. This is a modest, somewhat smug chase picture that wants only to entertain, and it does so with a cultural temperature near room level.