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Printer-Friendly ModeRunning Scared chaotic, enjoyable
February 27, 2006 —
Running Scared is a cornucopia of madness, a carnival of the bizarre. This is one of the most over the top and crazy movies to be made in years. And is it ever enjoyable.
Rarely have I felt so entertained at a movie. I almost stayed seated for the next showing. Sure it isn't always the most probable or even logical movie, but as a piece of artistic entertainment, Running Scared is a huge success. It is a delight for anyone capable of seeing the line between reality and the movies, especially as pertaining to massive, unrelenting amounts of violence and wildly deviant behavior.
Paul Walker stars as Joey Gazelle (yes, that really is the name of his character), in one of the most frantic roles out there. I mentioned in my review of Eight Below that the prospect of Paul Walker in a zombie movie was an entertaining one. Well, this is better.
The movie opens with a Quentin Tarantino-esque shootout that interrupts some sort of illegal operation in what appears to be a hotel room. The nature of the illegal operation is irrelevant; the pace is so fast that the few key concepts needed to understand the story popped up enough times that I was able to catch them the second or third time around. This is a good thing, because if you blink, you'll miss it.
The result of this shootout is that several "dirty" cops are killed. Paul Walker, involved but apparently pretty low on the totem poll, is given a gun that killed an officer and told to keep it hidden.
We learn shortly after that Walker lives with his wife, father, and his young son, and he has a hidden stash in his basement of all sorts of evidence he has hidden for his superiors. Oleg, the neighbor boy of Russian descent, ends up with the gun after seeing where they are stashed, and shoots Anzor (played wonderfully by Karel Roden, who viewers may recognize from 15 Minutes), who isn't really his father but acts as a very abusive and disturbed one.
I mentioned earlier a similarity between the style of this movie and those by Quentin Tarantino, and nowhere is that more readily found than in the character of Anzor. He has an unhealthy and amazing obsession with John Wayne that has to be seen to be believed, and the fascination is a key to the statements Running Scared makes about America and, at a deeper level, about hopes, dreams, and expectations as measured against reality.
One hit and miss quality of Running Scared is the camerawork. The extreme nature of the movie does indeed extend to the way it is shot, camera angles and all. Don't expect simple and standard cuts and angles here. Sometimes it works, like when Paul Walker rolls on the ground while firing at an opponent, and we see it from his perspective, the wildly rotating camera reflecting his movements as well as the revolving barrel of a gun.
Other times it doesn't work, such as in several instances where the camera wildly travels and rewinds and switches views, retelling events from different perspectives and differently after characters understand what happens. The technical difficulty of this is appreciable, but it adds little.
Is this a realistic movie? Certainly not. The amount of profanity and obscene violence in this film makes Goodfellas look like a children's special. The evil and the darkness that the various characters encounter on their sojourns into the depths of the city, as Walker searches for Oleg and the crucial gun, is jaw dropping.
This is not to say that there is no good in the movie; there is a certain level of goodness, but the dark must be penetrated in order to see it, which is what the movie intends us and the characters to do.
Another interesting question is whether or not this movie takes itself very seriously. I laughed in several moments, sometimes from the sheer absurdity and the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach.
Regardless, it's more than worth seeing to figure out what you think, even if just for the spectacle of it.