It's always encouraging when actors and filmmakers attempt to do something different, but sometimes it's just not meant to be. Running Scared is the sophomore effort from director Wayne Kramer (no, not that Wayne Kramer from MC5), and although it's a marked departure from his character-driven debut The Cooler, it's anything but an improvement.
The film stars Paul Walker (The Fast and the Furious), who's also trying to stretch out here, but just doesn't have the chops to get beyond that Rob Lowe/Keanu Reeves pretty boy image. Walker adopts a not-quite-believable New Jersey tough-guy accent and dutifully chews the scenery as Joey Gazelle, a petty crook desperately racing against time to recover a gun used to kill a cop and that can be traced back to him. The gun turns out to be in the possession of a 10-year-old boy (Cameron Bright, the spooky kid from Birth), and Joey's frenzied search brings both characters into contact with various denizens of the night, including Russian gangsters, pimps, hookers, dirty cops and, in the film's most gratuitously yucky scene, a smiling yuppie couple who make pedophiliac snuff films.
All of these encounters and characters are so stylized they border on the surreal and, since the entire movie takes place over the course of a single evening, Running Scared often seems like a cross between a wannabe After Hours and a wannabe Night of the Hunter. Not that you're likely to notice those lofty ambitions, since Running Scared is mostly interested in pouring on the blood and moving the camera around in pointlessly flashy ways that recall the worst excesses of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie.
Kramer clearly wants to wow us with how intense and gritty it all is, but despite the heaping helpings of extreme violence, the movie feels too contrived and calculated to really engage us. It's all just one damn thing after another as Walker races through the night encountering creep after creep, and the coincidences pile up in such absurd quantities that giggling becomes a very real option.
This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2006.
