It may have David Schwimmer (hit TV show Friends’ Dr Ross Geller) in the director’s chair and Hank Azaria (the voice of Moe the bartender, Apu and quite a few others in The Simpsons) in its cast but feel-good movie Run Fatboy Run is set in a comfortably multi-ethnic London. Originally conceived as an American offering, this delightfully colourful and quirky romantic comedy, whose title comes from a line uttered shortly before a key point in the movie, is a predominantly British production that topped the UK box office for four straight weeks.

Run Fatboy Run stars comic actor Simon Pegg (who also has co-scriptwriting credits with Michael Ian Black) as a slightly overweight and underachieving working-class bloke named Dennis Doyle. Five years ago, Dennis committed what may have been the biggest mistake of his life: He did a runner on his wedding day, leaving his heavily pregnant fiancée Libby (the luminous, even if underutilised, Thandie Newton) stranded at the altar.

Even though he hasn’t exactly been forgiven, Dennis has managed to stay friends with the rakish Gordon (Dylan Moran), his best man and Libby’s cousin – and is even allowed to regularly spend time with his and Libby’s young Lord of the Rings-loving son, Jake (Matthew Fenton). At the same time, not only does Libby regularly rebuff her former fiancé’s attempts to convince her to give him a second chance but she has also done a better job of rebuilding her life and moving on from their wedding day debacle.

In contrast to lowly security guard Dennis, who has problems paying his larger-than-life landlord, Mr Ghoshdashtidar (played by Harish Patel with a frequent twinkle in his eye), on time, Libby runs a very popular pastry shop and seems generally happy and comfortable with her situation. Then, as if to further underscore that he really should abandon all hope of rekindling their romantic relationship, she starts attracting – and responding positively to – the attention of hunky Whit (Hank Azaria), an American financial high-flyer and super-fit running enthusiast.

Dennis’s competitive instincts are aroused by Whit’s presence in the lives of the woman he still loves and the son he genuinely cares for. So, when he finds out that “Peter Perfect”, as he labels his rival, is taking part in an upcoming marathon, Dennis recklessly decides he too will run, never mind that he is a smoker, has never run a marathon and has only three weeks to prepare for the 26-mile-long race!

The way Run Fatboy Run starts off, it is not immediately obvious what Libby saw in Dennis that made her agree to marry him in the first place. While never a really bad guy, he seems such a loser – nor, if truth be told, is it as if the beer-bellied protagonist has been all that transformed by the end of the film. Yet, along the way, particularly as the movie enters its final stretch, enough is shown to reveal what the disparate likes of Libby, Gordon and Mr Ghoshdashtidar see in Dennis to feel about him as they do. So much so that I found myself warming considerably to both the actually not so fat ‘fatboy’ and a disarmingly endearing movie which benefits enormously from winning performances by both its principal actor and supporting cast.

Yvonne Teh