The closest Edgar Wright ever came to jumping the shark: “We’re faintly embarrassed”
If you haven’t seen the Edgar Wright reboot of The Running Man yet, then don’t be put off by the reports of it being a flop or a disappointment – see it on the biggest screen you can, and you won’t be let down by the mix of slick comic book action, knowing humour and nods to the 1980s original.
Even Glen Powell, who nearly made me never watch another movie again after Twisters, is very good in it.
There’s also an absolutely fantastic scene set to a Rolling Stones song from the album Goat’s Head Soup, which goes down as one of the coolest set pieces seen in a decade or so, or at least since Wright managed it the last time when he set a bank heist to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion at the beginning of Baby Driver.
And this is the good thing about Wright’s films, you now pretty much know what you’re going to get when you sit down at the cinema: a couple of hours of escapism, knowing references, laugh-out-loud moments and some outrageously good tunes. Doesn’t sound bad, does it? The reason he’s now perfected this heady brew is that he’s been doing it for a long time, starting way back at the end of the last century with Spaced, the word-of-mouth Channel 4 hit he created with Simon Pegg.
Across just 14 episodes and with the help of their future Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz costar Nick Frost, the pair constructed a sitcom packed with video games, memorable characters, surreal adventures, pop culture references and a very strange downstairs artist neighbour called Brian. It was like someone had literally designed a show from the ground up that students would go crazy over, and they duly did.
It also served as a blueprint for Wright’s comedy movies to come, and you can see exactly that in the quickfire jump cuts and montages, the love for 1980s action movies and the soundtrack stuffed full of top tunes by the likes of the Chemical Brothers, Nightmares on Wax and Coldcut.
But even over two short seasons, there were still moments that Wright looks back on somewhat between his fingers, as he told The AV Club, saying: “There were moments in the second season where if we didn’t jump the shark, we came very close.”
For the uninitiated (and anyone who didn’t watch Happy Days, or doesn’t actually know what Happy Days is), ‘Jumping the shark’ refers to the point in any show where they’ve basically run out of ideas, and so, like the Fonz in the long-running Happy Days, they resort to a character doing something like jumping over a shark, on a jet ski.
Wright went on: “I think looking back, we’re faintly embarrassed by the Matrix episode. Even though there’s loads of good jokes in that one. I think at the time, we thought The Matrix was as cool as we thought Star Wars was during the first season. It was very funny timing that the first and second series landed on either side of The Phantom Menace. It’s kind of amusing.”
Both Pegg and Wright were indeed Star Wars obsessives, with Pegg even writing his university thesis on the George Lucas franchise. Little did he know back then that thanks to the success of Spaced and then the Cornetto trilogy, he would wind up not just playing a character in the 2015 instalment The Force Awakens but also serving as a script advisor on the film for director JJ Abrams.
