Annie (played by Kristen Bell) is happily living with her boyfriend Charlie (played by Dax Shepard)in a rural town. Charlie's full name is Charles Bronson. He says he is named after a prisoner from England who changed his name to Charles Bronson while in prison to honor the fictional character from the movies. Their quiet life is threatened when Annie gets an interview at a big university in Los Angeles to run the conflict resolution program. Her boss at the local school has found the opportunity for Annie and basically tells her to go take the new job, simultaneously firing her from her old one. Without any other prospects and nothing else she can do, Annie goes home to tell Charlie that she is moving to Los Angeles. In fact, she will be leaving very soon because her interview for the new job is already scheduled.
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Charlie 'sreaction is less than pleased because he does not want to leave the small town and he does not want to lose his girlfriend at the same time. Charlie is in a witness protection program so he cannot talk much about his previous years, but Annie knows he is in the program and has accepted it. Charlie is being watched over by a bumbling federal agent named Randy (played by Tom Arnold) who has the duty because he mishandled his firearm twice and it went off by accident previously.
Rather than lose his girlfriend, Charlie makes up his mind to go with her to take her to Los Angeles for her interview. He uncovers a hot rod car he had stashed in the garage. He uses it to drive Annie to Los Angeles. Charlie is risking being killed by going to LA, nevertheless he takes the risk. Annie's ex-boyfriend is a cop, Gil Rathbinn (played by Michael Rosenbaum). He runs the license plate info on Charlie and finds out that he got a plea bargain for being the get-away driver for bank robbers, by ratting them out during trial. Gil decides to go after Charlie and Annie because of the danger to Annie and because he wants Annie back. To get even with Charlie for stealing his girl, Gil informs the bad guy who is the leader of the bank robbery gang, Alex Dmitri (played by Bradley Cooper) of the location of Charlie. This creates a chase where Gil, the federal agent, and the bank robbers are all in pursuit of Charlie and Annie. The federal agent is stopped by local cops for speeding, identifies himself as a police officer, and that is how the local policemen also join in the case. They all converge on Charlie father's farm.
Charlie's real name is Yul Perrkins and Clint Perrkins (played by Beau Bridges) is Charlie's father. They all end up on the farm because that is where Charlie hid the money from the bank robbery. The bank robbery gang, led by Alex, wants revenge even though when Charlie ratted out his friends to save himself and kept the money, Charlie's testimony was discredited. They got off when the case was dismissed. Dimitri plans to get the bank robbery money, convert it to Iraqi dinars because they will accept the marked bills in Iraq and get away with a fortune. It all comes down to whether Dimitri can force Charlie to give him the money and then escape from the police that are chasing them.
Best part of story, including ending:
There are lots of high speed chase scenes and the bumbling federal agent has lots of trouble controlling his weapon, which gets loose to fire off shots inside his car. That part is hilarious.
Best scene in story:
A funny scene is when Charlie has to admit to Annie that he was a bank robber. She asks him how many banks he robbed. At first he cannot remember then he says 12 or 13. She is not pleased that he robbed so many that he cannot remember how many there were.
Opinion about the main character:
I like that Charlie seems to be a nice guy, even though in his past he was a criminal felon.
