Movies / Movie Reviews

Running Scared Review

By Al Kratina
March 1, 2006 - 23:32

Always keep the safety on when pointing guns at posters.

Pulp fiction is making a comeback in modern cinema. And here I’m speaking of the narrative style, not the movie of the same name. For the movie to come back it would have to have left at one point, and I could go at least one week without hearing someone quote the “Royale with cheese” line. But the cartoonish villains, the hard men and loose women, the depraved, sunless cities where daylight never quite reaches the concrete streets, these are finally back on the silver screen, after spending a fair bit of time in Batman comics and bootlegged Shadow radio plays.

It took a while to get it right, however. There’s a fine line between the over-the-top excess of old Samuel Fuller films and annoying self-parody, and Quentin Tarantino takes up a lot of room straddling it. Wayne Kramer’s Running Scared, however, manages to succeed in this tricky genre, by transforming the exaggerated nihilism of Sin City into a dark urban fairy-tale. He does this mainly by adding colour and making sure his performers can act instead of just reading Frank Miller dialogue out loud.

Starring Paul Walker and Cameron Bright, Running Scared follows a lost gun and the repercussions it has on New Jersey’s criminal underworld. The film flirts with surrealism and fantasy, while still keeping one foot grounded in the gritty reality we’ve come to associate with crime thrillers like Narc and City of God. It takes us through a world where each character we meet is more reprehensible than the last, and every step the main character takes gets him deeper and deeper into trouble. At times, the characters populating the film seem so horrible the movie becomes almost absurd, but that’s when the elements of fantasy begin to work in the film’s favour, helping keep it aloft when it loses touch with reality.

The film’s only real flaw, however, is in its visual style. Well, if you’re unfortunate enough not to have a moral code informed entirely by Grand Theft Auto, you might also take issue with its unrepentantly graphic violence and borderline depravity, but I’m more interested in the visuals. Before the film reaches an improbable conclusion that nearly undermines the entire endeavour, it manages to get quite a solid momentum going. Almost. Kramer can’t seem to resist shooting the action scenes at every variable camera speed he can think of, and edits everything like he went over the rushes with a lawnmower. Every once in a while, Running Scared forgets it’s a movie and convinces itself that it’s either the opening credits of Se7en or a rock video from the late ‘90s, and that’s when the style distracts from the story, and the film’s momentum comes to a grinding halt. And when you’re surrounded by pimps, drug dealers, and murderers, the last thing you want to do is stop.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12