Running Scared (2006) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

"Running Scared is a vicious and brutal B-movie jacked up to hysterical, hallucinatory proportions -- a pulpy, violent action picture that torments the viewer as much as its characters ...

... and I mean that as a compliment."

*** The Miami Herald ***

 

Paul Walker plays Joey Gazelle, a small-time hoodlum who is entrusted with the responsibility of disposing the weapons used in a mob massacre which resulted in the death of many (crooked) cops. For reasons of his own, Joey hides the weapons in his own basement, where they are found by two kids. The kid next door uses one of the guns to shoot his abusive stepfather, a mobster, and this sets up a desperate situation which Joey must deal with. Joey knows that the slugs in the dead cops and the slug in the stepfather can be matched, so he has to run around and tamper with some evidence before everyone else finds out what he already knows. Meanwhile, the boy next door is scared and has run away with the gun, so Joey has get to the gun and the boy before anyone else does. The movie's frenetic pace captures Joey's high-speed quest to outmaneuver the cops and the mob for control of the gun, the slugs, and the boy.

That simple summary doesn't convey much about the film's intrinsic nature. There is nothing in this film which resembles reality, or even approaches it. It is a pulp cinema concoction which exists in its own form of comic book reality. The bad guys are one-dimensional, ugly, and evil beyond redemption. The violence and torture scenes are stylized and over-the-top. The plot twists are improbable and operatic. The cinematography and editing are flamboyant. The plot moves very fast, everything is exaggerated, and the whole adventure plays out like Sin City as remade by Tony Scott.

In general, critics were not very receptive to the film, although there were exceptions. It also failed almost completely at the box office: it had a bad opening week, a massive drop-off in the second week, and virtually nothing thereafter. Despite all those negatives, it has managed to accumulate minor cult status among the fans of pulp cinema.

As the Philadelphia Inquirer noted:

If Running Scared had come out in 1994, before Pulp Fiction, it - and (director Wayne) Kramer - would be hailed as blazingly original. But questions of originality notwithstanding, there's plenty of blazing going on here.

As we say here in Tejas, I kinda liked it my ownself. If you think about the film too much, it may seem juvenile, but isn't that also true of Leon or Pulp Fiction or Sin City? That's the nature of the pulp cinema genre. The way the movie experience actually works in Running Scared is that there really isn't much time to consider analytical matters because the director serves up the action like a boxer using body blows: the strategy is to keep you from catching your breath. It moves fast, it hammers away constantly, it catches your attention early, and it's pumped full of adrenalin. Best of all, it manages to do all that while letting the story and characters breathe a bit. Oh, sure, it's no Cameron Crowe movie in terms of character development, but the lead actors (Paul Walker and Vera Farmiga) manage to make their characters seem enough like flesh-and-blood people that the story seems to have at least some anchor in reality. Although the technique is flashy, I didn't ever get a feeling that the story was taking a back seat to the director's pyrotechnics, unlike Tony Scott's Domino, for example.

It does seem to me that the IMDb score of 7.2 is a tad high, and I can see why some critics disliked it, because it is not a very thoughtful movie and it's all been done before by Richie and Besson and others. On the other hand, I can also see why some younger guys thought it was pretty cool. This isn't the kind of film I would pick out for my own pleasure, but I think it may just hit the spot for you if you like such directors as Quentin Tarantino, Luc Besson, Guy Richie, Tony Scott, and Robert Rodriguez. It's a solid offering among those films for 12-year-old boys of all ages.