Movie Review Running Scared

Running Scared (2006) 

Directed by Wayne Kramer 

Written Wayne Kramer

Starring Paul Walker, Cameron Bright, Vera Farmiga, Michael Cudlitz

Release Date February 24th, 2006

Published February 24th, 2006 

Violence for the sake of violence is not necessarily a hallmark of the thriller genre, unless you're Quentin Tarentino. The thriller Running Scared shows why most thrillers begin with a plot and then introduce only the violence necessary to tell the story. Overwhelmed by its blood, guts and body count, Running Scared devolves quickly from a fast paced, Tony Scott inspired thriller into a nonsensical horror film.

Making matters worse is the fact that the film was directed by the terrific young auteur Wayne Kramer who made such a great splash with his debut feature The Cooler. Running Scared is a major step backward for a director with more talent than what this film demonstrates.

Paul Walker stars as Joey Gazelle, a low level mobster with the simple task of getting rid of dirty guns. After a drug deal goes bad and Joey's boss (Johnny Messner) kills a dirty cop, it's up to Joey to get rid of the piece, a pearl handled snub nosed revolver. Joey however has another idea. In covering his own backside he has been taking the hot guns he was supposed to be disposing of and hiding them in his basement in case he needs them for leverage.

Things go bad for Joey when one of his son's friends, Oleg (Cameron Bright) takes the pearl handle gun from his stash and uses it to try and kill his abusive father (John Noble). The kid fails to kill his dad, who also happens to have mob connections, and is now on the streets with the hot piece. Joey must find the kid and retrieve the gun before his partners or the cops find it first.

The plot to Running Scared is a correlative to Robert Altman's brilliant but short lived anthology series Gun which aired briefly on ABC in the mid-nineties. That show followed the path of a gun from one owner to the next and detailed the havoc wreaked in its wake. In the case of the gun in Running Scared it's the lives of mobsters, dirty cops, gang bangers and one small child.

Where Gun was a brilliant verbose little drama, Running Scared is a brutally violent and utterly meaningless mess of a film. Director Wayne Kramer, who made the far more interesting film The Cooler with William H. Macy, directs Running Scared as if he wished he had made a horror film instead of a gritty thriller. Amping up the body count to cover up his lack of a compelling plot, Kramer is forced to rely on his sleepy eyed star to provide the film's driving force and oh what a mistake that is.

Paul Walker with his slacker, frat boy, surfer demeanor is an actor I find insufferable. Though he was not bad in the doggy adventure flick Eight Below he was out acted by a group of huskies. He was okay in the Fast and Furious films but those movies aren't exactly challenging cinema. Running Scared wants to be something a little more than a cheap violent thriller but because Walker's only emotions are confused and sleepy the film falls short of exciting or even playful.

Kramer's love of over the top violence and seeing my sexuality are not merely reminiscent of Tony Scott they are, in Running Scared, an outright ripoff. The whip pan camera work and overlapping film stocks are direct lifts from Scott's last two features Domino and Man On Fire. The ridiculous violence and high body count a nod to Scott's True Romance.

The only originality to seep into this dark, dystopian thriller is a hockey torture scene that has received heavy rotation in the films ad campaign. The look of the scene is clever and the torture is something I had never seen before. The scene is bloody and a bit of a nail biter. Unfortunately this good scene is rare amidst the misguided plot.

Running Scared is a bizarre little film. Violent to the point of parody, the film could qualify as a horror flick for the amount of blood and guts that get spilled but it's all in service of nothing. There is nothing you can take away from the film. This film's many influences, Tony Scott and Quentin Tarentino among others, are each far superior. While Scott's last two films, Domino and Man On Fire were not great films, Scott's direction is amped and always in service of a compelling if flawed plot.

Tarentino is, of course, the master of screen violence. Kill Bill 1 & 2 are the only films outside the horror film genre that can favorably compare body counts with Running Scared. The difference is the violence in Tarentino's masterpieces plays like a blood and guts symphony. Each bullet fired, each slice of a samurai blade a note in a grand opera of eloquent violence. In Running Scared the violence is simply for the sake of being violent. The style of the film, the grit, the color scheme and the whip pans, are merely showing off and never part of a coherent vision of how to present screen violence.

Violence for violence sake is okay in the horror genre, but it gets old quickly in the thriller or noir genre if it is not clearly in service of a good plot. The plot to Running Scared is simply not compelling enough to justify the blood, guts and body count. Pure viscerality can only get a movie so far before you need to give the audience something to really chew on.

Running Scared is a step backward for a director who showed eclectic style in his debut feature. Wayne Kramer's The Cooler was a hard R-rated character piece with an excellent cast that was directed with a purpose. The violence and sexuality of The Cooler worked with its compelling characters and unique plot not against them. There was simply more to that film than the action and flesh displayed.

Running Scared never stops moving which works for maybe 45 minutes but without great characters and not much of a plot the wheels eventually come off and the film flies off the rails.