If we bracket off all those low-budget slasher flicks that seem to be all the rage these days, Running Scared just might be the sickest mainstream movie since Sin City (2005; my review). True, it does not aspire to quite the same kind of visual creativity, but it has a few tricks of its own up its sleeve — the rewind-and-replay-from-a- different-angle feature is a particular favorite — and it has a similarly trashy flair for sex, violence, and a few truly creepy things besides. But whereas Sin City had the courage of its fatalistic convictions, Running Scared is even harder to justify, precisely because it tries to put a bogus silver lining on its dark, grim cloud.
The story begins with low-level mobster Joey Gazelle (Paul Walker) carrying a blood-stained boy named Oleg Yugorsky (Cameron Bright) into a car and driving off in a panic. We then jump back 18 hours in time, to a mob deal that Joey happened to attend, which goes bad when several hooded men burst into the room with guns. A fight ensues, and writer-director Wayne Kramer makes sure we catch ever gory detail by capturing the most vicious moments — a slash across the Achilles tendon here, a bullet to the groin there, a man flying back and smearing his blood all over the wall — in close-up and slow-motion. Once the dust settles, the mobsters discover that the hooded men were dirty cops, so they give their guns to Joey and tell him to get rid of them, lest their weapons be tied to the crime scene.
Joey doesn’t take care of the guns right away, though. Instead, he goes home, has a sexual interlude of sorts with his wife Teresa (Vera Farmiga) on the washing machine, and hides the guns in a secret compartment in his basement. What Joey doesn’t know is that his son Nicky (Alex Neuberger) is playing in the basement with Oleg, the Russian kid from next door, and the two boys see everything. So when gunfire is heard from the Yugorsky house next door later that evening, it turns out that Oleg has taken one of those guns and run away. This puts Joey in a tight spot; he can’t let the cops catch Oleg or trace the gun back to him, but he also can’t let his bosses in the mob know that he let the gun get away.
So the film becomes a nightmare journey through a city full of pimps, hookers, and worse, as Oleg runs for his life and Joey goes looking for Oleg; and along the way, Joey has to take time out from his search to attend meetings in all-night diners and strip joints with his fellow mobsters and Detective Rydell (Chazz Palminteri), the corrupt cop who is pretty sure that Oleg’s theft of the gun has given him exactly what he needs to nail the mobsters for good. To complicate matters even further, it turns out that Oleg’s father (Karel Roden) — a psychotic John Wayne fan, of all things — is related to a Russian mob boss (The Return of the King‘s John Noble) that Joey’s bosses were thinking of doing business with.
Oleg, meanwhile, comes across an outrageously flamboyant and self-described “mac daddy pimp” who beats a prostitute by bashing her face into the headlight on his car; and later, while escaping some other person, Oleg sneaks into a van which just happens to belong to a couple (Bruce Altman and Elizabeth Mitchell) so perky and upbeat that you just know they’re going to turn out to be child molesters. Pity poor young Bright, a Vancouver-based actor whose somewhat eerie appearance — a critic once compared him to a Christopher Walken bobblehead doll — seems to land him in these sorts of roles; his other credits include The Butterfly Effect (2004; my comments), where he played the son of a child pornographer, and Birth (2004; my comments), where he claimed to be the reincarnation of Nicole Kidman’s husband before sharing a bathtub scene with her.
The child-molester subplot is one of the film’s cynical low points, and it is also where things get truly surreal. It would be a stretch to call this movie “realistic”, but most of the time, you can at least believe that everything in front of the camera is somehow “there” in the story. Here, however, as Oleg sneaks into a bathroom with a cell phone to call for help, spooky, expressionistic monster- shaped shadows flit across the shower screen behind him. The sequence seems to exist merely to let Joey off the hook for all the threats and crimes that he participates in, as he tries to save his skin. Teresa, who comes to rescue Oleg, is shaken by what she finds, and later she tells her mob-connected husband, “I have never seen evil before tonight.” Really, never? Lest there be any doubt as to where her husband fits on the morality continuum, she goes on to explain that Joey may be “shady, sleazy, mixed up with the wrong people,” but, you know, at least he’s not like those people.
Apparently the filmmakers don’t think even Teresa’s assurances are enough, so as the film comes to its stylishly violent conclusion — in a black-lit hockey rink where the Russians assault Joey with bright neon-coloured hockey pucks — they throw in another plot twist or two that are designed to make Joey look like even more of a good guy. This, despite his constant violent attacks on anyone and everyone who might have the gun that he’s looking for, and despite one scene in which Joey seems to admit to Oleg that he beat up his own abusive dad when he was a teenager; Joey, who had never warmed up to Oleg before, concludes this rare moment of male bonding by telling the boy that if he waits just a few years, then he, too, can do the same. How touching. But the new plot twists are simply absurd, and do little more than to confirm the cynical attitudes driving this movie.
It must be said that the film is never boring, and writer-director Kramer, who co-wrote the similarly trashy Mindhunters (2004; my review) and got some good notices for directing The Cooler (2003), gives Running Scared all the energy it needs and then some. But none of these characters are exactly likeable, and Kramer spends a bit too much time dwelling on their ugly sides — and all while dishing up savage violence and naked breasts and whatever else it takes to pander to his audience’s baser appetites. Joey and his wife may think that he’s okay because everybody else in this movie is worse, but surely we can do better than that.
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