Running Scared

Running Scared (2006)
Starring: Paul Walker, Cameron Bright and Vera Farmiga
Directed by: Wayne Kramer
Rating: **1/2

One of the many (self-described) talents that I pride myself on in my small group of friends is being able to dissern wehther or not a film is going to be one that is going to be fairly decent or even one that I will find myself enjoying based purely on the trailer. Such is the case of the 2006 film Running Scared which I thought looked very cool and sylized from the trailers but ultimately looked like something that would be thin on plot and hard to sit through... something very similar to Domino which I saw for free and really just couldn't stand.

Well, thanks to the wonderful invention that is Netflix, I figured that I would give Running Scared a shot because I had heard so many good things about it from reviewers, imdb.com, and some of my own friends whose opinions I take in to consideration for relation to what I would like or dislike. I thought that maybe I had misjudged Running Scared and it was going to be one of those gems that I let slip through my fingers when it was in theatres like The Matrix or American Beauty... sadly, as I found myself watching the 2 hour and 2 minute mess of a movie that is Running Scared, I couldn't help but ask myself "Why?"

For those who may have forgot Running Scared's short commerical run, it is a very stylized film starring Paul Walker as Joey Gazelle as a small-time gangster and faithful family man (aren't they all?) who gets caught up in a case of misunderstanding with shades of a power grab when a gun that has quickly dispensed of several would-be criminals who actually turn out to be undercover cops needs to be tossed. Gazelle prepairs the gun to be disposed of as he comes home to his smoking hot wife Teresa (Vera Farmiga), 10-year-old son Nicky (Alex Neuberger), and his son's friend Oleg Yugorsky (Cameron Bright) for dinner.

Joey doesn't like Oleg, or rather, Joey doesn't like his son hanging around Oleg mostly because of his parents (John Nobel and Elizabeth Mitchell) who we find out are your typical disfunctional family of Russian immigrants where the mother is beaten on a regular basis by the father who sits and watches old John Wayne movies alone on the couch. Don't we all? Don't we all? Maybe the real tension is because the kingpin of the mob operation he's supposed to be covering for is headed up by Mr. Yugorsky's brother Anzor? Hmmmm. Quite a perdicament.

Well, it seems that Joey had a good reason to distrust his son's friend who, after leaving the Gazelle household, pulls a gun on his abusive father and proceeds to take him down... unfortunately for Joey, the gun little Oleg used on his father was the one he was supposed to ditch for his mob friends and with the cops involved, it'll be an easy connection to be made between the shooting of Mr. Yugorsky and the downing of half a dozen undercover narcotics officers earlier that day. This is all very bad for Joey, who, for the rest of the movie is forced to chase down a frightened Oleg across New Jersey and get the gun back in his possession before the cops... or worse, his bosses come looking for him.

Sounds like a pretty decent plot right? Well... it would be, if the movie could decide what it wants to be. It tries to be a gangster action flick, a moral parable, an urban fairytale and a plot twisting splatter-fest all at the same time never really picking one and ultimately left me with a bad taste in my mouth. But the movie does have some redeaming values and so, here's how I came up with my rating for Running Scared:

Acting: **

It's going to seem like I'm trashing on this movie for the first two categories, but it's just the luck of the draw that acting and plot are on the short end of the "good" things I can say about this movie.

As far as acting goes... there are a few bright spots with the two child actors, Cameron Bright and Alex Neuberger actually putting in some good performances give the subject material. It's almost sad that these two young actors with so few projects under their belts (minus some of the more recent work of Bright) that they can outshine veteran actors like Paul Walker and Karel Roden (who plays the mob boss Anzor Yugorsky). Walker and Roden both overact their parts and considering the big 'twist' at the end of the film (why does every film need a twist?) it all seems even more over the top and cheesy.

Plot: *-1/2

It should be pretty simple to come up with plot devices for a simple mob/chase movie right? Well apparently for Kramer, who also wrote the screenplay, he spent so much time perfecting the cool graphics that the plot was apparently thrown together by those tank dolphins that help write Family Guy episodes. That's what it seems like anyways... that Walker through plot ideas in to a hat and just pulled them out randomly and peiced them together and said "Bam! There's my script."

It's really too bad too, because there were some interesting concepts explored in the film (like the idea of an urban fairytale through the eyes of a scared child) that could have made a film in and of itself if they spent more time fleshing out the idea. Instead what you're left with is a mess of conveneant events which have gun being handed off across Jersey as Joey (who while having his heart in the right place, seems dumb as a brick) continually finds ways to track it down. Meanwhile you have the story of Oleg who, after basically ditches the gun 1/3 of the way through the film, is caught up in trying to hide from the police, or even worse, his father who survived the attack.

What makes the bulk of this movie so frustrating isn't the constant unbelievable series of events (I can suspend my disbelief for a film like this) but how utterly useless they end up being to the end result of the film. I mean come on... at least make the conveneant plot points have some kind of POINT to them if you're going to use them so carlessly. The film acts like it respects its audience enough to handle the subject matter but then slaps them in the face when it comes to wrapping up all the lose ends.

Special Effects/Cinematography: ****

Here we see where Kraymer spent a lot of his time. From the opening sequence to the credits, there is so much fantastic artistry in this film it's hard to take it all in at once. From the gun battle between the mobsters and undercover cops in a very Max Payne style to the black light hockey rink showdown between the mob factions trying to recover the stolen gun it's all very stylized and in my opinion well done.

The only issue I have with it is that no it seems very experimental and unfocused. Things like the Nosferatu-style shadow against the shower curtain when Oleg is trapped in the pedophiles' bathroom (don't ask) aren't really explained very well and seem to occur too quickly for people to really pick up. I don't expect a "trick" to be used constantly through out the film, but if you're going to open with the Max Payne style gun fight sequence, you have to keep giving the audience little tastes of that vision throughout the film instead of shooting that wad 3 more times over the span of 120 minutes.

Direction: **-1/2

I have to give Kraymer some credit for being able to make Paul Walker seem atleast half-way decent... but it would really help if the director had some direction too. It just seems like Kraymer is all over the place and I think he had a lot of good ideas but none of them really ever seemed to be used to their full potential.

Also, Kraymer needs to decide if he's going to respect his audience enough to handle the violent and disturbing subject matter or if he's going to make fools out of them by force-feeding them convenient plot points to keep the story moving to some bullshit Hollywood ending. It just reeks of bad choices and bad direction... and when that comes from a director, you know your film is in trouble.

Entertainment Value: ***-1/2

All negatives aside, for what this film is... it's actually not so bad from an entertainment perspective. It was easy to follow (up until the end) and you could really relate to Walker's character (up until the end) as the mobster who does what he does just so his family can have a better life. And as much as I made a point about the stupid plot, the mini-plots throughout the film, on their own at least, were interesting and really showed the underbelly of society against an overall plot of redemption and salvation.

Good vs. Evil is very apparent in this film, i just wish that idea was fleshed out more and made as distinct as it should have been for a film like this. Kraymer may have been going for the whole "shades of gray" P.O.V. here, but rather than mixing good and evil and having people decide what side Joey stood on, he just ended up having seperate cases of black and white they became dilluted but unmixed.

I really wanted to like this film, I really did, because I wanted to believe my friends that it wasn't such a bad film, but the more I think about it, the more I really dislike Running Scared just like Domino for promising to be a film I had always hoped for to mix a dark storyline with pretty graphics but ultimately fell short of its potential.

The one silver lining to this dark cloud would be that Kraymer's "urban fairytale" concept was something that I really really did enjoy and think it should be expanded on... possibly by Kraymer himself, but definately someone needs to do a good dark fairytale in the real world story with the awesome graphic capabilities film has now... so far all the attempts I've seen (Brother's Grimm, Running Scared, Lady in the Water) have fallen way way too short.

So with a star count of

Acting: **
Plot: *-1/2
Cinematography: ****
Direction: **-1/2
Entertainment Value: ***

We get the final total of **-1/2 out of 5 for Running Scared.