Marathon

Directed by Keith Strausbaugh and Anthony Guidubaldi, Marathon follows several runners, including Tavius Cortez’s Shareef Washington and Andrew Hansen’s Ryan O’Brien, as they prepare to participate in a local race known as the Devil’s Canyon Marathon. Filmmakers Strausbaugh and Guidubaldi, working from their own screenplay, deliver a sporadically watchable yet mostly underwhelming fake documentary that feels long even at 81 minutes, as the movie, which feels heavily improvised, suffers from a lackadaisical, meandering atmosphere that paves the way for a midsection that’s hardly as tight or streamlined as one might’ve hoped – with the less-than-engrossing atmosphere perpetuated (and compounded) by an often astonishing lack of laughs. (It doesn’t help, certainly, that Strausbaugh and Guidubaldi generally emphasize jokes and gags of an entirely obvious and unsubtle nature, including the revelation that one of the participants is “crab” loading instead of carb loading.) And although the various performers are, for the most part, affable enough, Marathon‘s proliferation of hopelessly underwhelming subplots (eg one runner is attempting to break a record while dressed as a fruit) slowly-but-surely prevents the viewer from working up the slightest bit of interest in or sympathy for the protagonists’ exploits – which, in addition to ensuring that the climactic race is hardly able to pack the exciting, satisfying punch Strausbaugh and Guidubaldi have surely intended, cements the picture’s place as a well-intentioned misfire that never quite earns its feature-length running time.

** out of ****