But the incessant branding is creepy, and it becomes very oppressive when Dennis, exhausted in the middle of his run, encounters the 'wall' which is imagined as a huge, real wall in front of him, but from which brick-shaped holes are punched as underdog Dennis heroically focuses his attitude.
It should all have been fine, and I was even happy to overlook a flatulence-symptom gag outrageously pinched from Airplane! - and also the use of the Gherkin building, traditionally the sign of a bad and touristy film about London. There's a very funny cameo from David Walliams, playing an oddball customer in a cake-shop queue who has a queeny row with Dennis, getting upset and slightly traumatised in the process, and shouts what he imagines to be a devastating put-down line while at the same time suddenly staring up into the middle-distance above Dennis's head in a very mad and well-observed way.
Simon Pegg has a brilliant face for comedy, especially when he does his desperate, ingratiating smile - it's a face that lights up with hyper-satirical self-awareness and it's used to great effect as Pegg plays a basically decent guy who did a terrible thing and is now enduring a Calvary of loneliness and remorse, employed as a security guard in a women's underwear shop and living in a grotty basement flat, whose landlord Mr Ghoshdashtidar (Harish Patel) candidly loathes him.
