Running Scared (2006/Theatrical Film Review)

 

Stars: Paul Walker, Vera Farmiga, Cameron Bright, Chazz Palminteri

Director: Wayne Kramer

Critic's rating: 5 out of 10

 

By Chuck O'Leary

 

 

Writer-director Wayne Kramer's extremely violent new crime-thriller Running Scared is not a remake of Peter Hyams' 1986 buddy-cop film starring Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines.  The only thing they share is the same title.

 

The new Running Scared is Kramer's first film since making a name for himself a couple of years ago with the highly-entertaining study of a Las Vegas loser, The Cooler.  Interestingly, though, Kramer doesn't follow that critically-acclaimed film with another prestige project or a big-budget A-list production. Instead, he follows the movie that put him on the map with a violent exploitation film.

 

Despite some fancy camera tricks and trendy, faded-out cinematography, Running Scared is nothing more than an exploitation flick full of carnage, but it could have been a good exploitation flick if it didn't get carried away with piling on the plot twists. 

 

Paul Walker, currently on screen in the infinitely more family-friendly Eight Below, stars in Running Scared as a New Jersey mob flunky named Joey Gazelle, who has a seemingly normal home life with his wife Teresa (Vera Farmiga in the film's best performance) and pre-teen son Nicky (Alex Neuberger). 

 

Joey's job is to make firearms used in mob-related crimes disappear.

 

To make a very busy plot as simple as possible, Joey must stash a gun used in a shootout between mob thugs and crooked cops.  As usual, Joey's hiding place is in his basement, which is also where Nicky and Nicky's friend from next door, Oleg (Cameron Bright), play hockey.

 

Nicky and Oleg find the hidden cache of firearms, and Oleg secretly takes one of the guns, which just so happens to be the silver six-shooter used hours earlier in the bloody clash between the mob and cops.  Oleg's stepfather is a former Russian mobster (Karel Roden) and an abusive louse. Shortly after taking the gun, Oleg and his mother are on the receiving end of some of the stepfather's physical abuse.  Oleg ends up shooting and wounding his stepfather in the shoulder, and then goes on the lam.

 

Knowing if the police find the weapon it will implicate him and his mob associates, the rest of Running Scared amounts to Joey searching all of northern New Jersey for Oleg in a desperate attempt to retrieve the gun.  During his search, Joey must outmaneuver his Italian mob associates, the Russian mob and a corrupt police detective (Chazz Palminteri), while Oleg finds himself threatened by a vicious pimp (David Warshofsky) and a yuppie couple (Bruce Altman and Elizabeth Mitchell) who turn out to be child molesters/killers.  

 

The whole subplot involving the yuppie child molesters comes out of nowhere and seems inspired by that sequence in Pulp Fiction where Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames find themselves trapped in the basement of some murderous sadists.  But this extraneous sequence is nevertheless incredibly gripping, and builds to a moment that's sure to elicit cheers from audiences.

 

The overwrought, over-the-top Running Scared is effective on a purely visceral level, and it definitely holds one's attention.  I just wish it didn't feel the need to go overboard with ridiculous plot twists.  A film with this much intensity doesn't need to keep trying to fool the audience.  If only Kramer had more confidence in his material, and kept things a little more grounded in reality, Running Scared would have succeeded as a lurid guilty pleasure.  Unfortunately, though, it's content with being the kind of movie where Walker gets three slapshoted hockey pucks to the face, and miraculously escapes with just a few scratches and no swelling.  Apparently the faces of handsome, young leading men don't bruise as easily.