Auto chases make hit or miss comedy some fun

“Hit and Run” fits into the tradition of car-chase comedies — automotive epics that were more about burnt rubber than good acting. Hollywood gearhead Dax Shepard, of “Baby Mama” and TV’s “Parenthood,” rounded up his fiancee and “When in Rome” co-star, Kristen Bell, and a bunch of their friends, piled into a collection of cars — classic and new — and tore up some California backroads in a movie about, well, tearing up rural California backroads.

Shepard plays “Charlie Bronson.” No, that’s not his real name. He’s in the witness protection program, far from Los Angeles. One thing that is real is Charlie’s love for community college “conflict resolution” teacher Annie (Bell).

“If you want, I’ll spend every moment with you for the rest of my life,” he coos to her in bed. She swoons.

That is tested when Annie has a shot at a job with a college in L.A. Charlie can kiss her goodbye and stay out of the city where his life is in danger. Or he can risk it all for love.

His accident-prone witness protection marshal (Tom Arnold) is against it. Annie’s ex (Michael Rosenbaum) is hell-bent on stopping them.

And waiting in L.A. is the psychopathic, dreadlocked killer (Bradley Cooper, in fine form) just waiting for this guy not-really-named-Charles Bronson to make an appearance so they can settle old scores.

Charlie figures Annie’s worth the risk. He pulls his entirely-too-distinctive suicide-doors hot rod Lincoln out of mothballs and dashes south, pursued by the hapless Randy (Arnold) in his mini-van and the lunatic Gil (Rosenbaum) in his Pontiac Solstice roadster.

It’s a movie of random, comical cameos (Kristin Chenoweth, David Koechner) and raunchy riffs on senior citizen “swinger” clubs, prison sex and curing oneself of casual homophobic slurs. Annie tries to anger-manage everybody, to no avail. Charlie tries to outrun everybody, with no better result.

It doesn’t really hold together and stand up to much scrutiny. But the car stuff is fun, some bits are laugh-out-loud funny and Bell and Shepard make an adorable couple. When you see that yes, that’s really Shepard doing his own stunts and Bell is in the car with him, it adds to the movie’s retro sense of automotive anarchy.

“Hit and Run” only aims to be a B-movie — its plot is nonsensical and its pace is sluggish between the chases. But you have to hand the wheel off to Shepard & Co. They’re onto something the cinema has missed.

Memo: ‘Hit and Run’

DIRECTED BY: David Palmer and Dax Shepard

STARRING: Dax Shepard, Kristen Bell, Bradley Cooper, Tom Arnold and Kristin Chenoweth

RATED: R GRADE: C+

RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes