Running scared

Go see this movie, it is NUTS!! This movie will keep you on the edge of your seat, and probably make you feel sick at one part,(and it's not a gory thing) and if you saw it you know what I am talking about. Anyone see this movie yet?

 

I saw this film earlier in the week, and I must say it was a vigorous and perverse entertainment. I wasn?t expecting much going into the theater, yet I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this exercise in stylistic excess was so preposterous and over-the-top that it achieved a level of sublimity all its own.

Written and directed by Wayne Kramer (who made a better film a couple of years ago entitled "The Cooler"), "Running Scared" stars the ubiquitous Paul Walker as a mafia lackey who becomes entangled in a plot so labyrinthine, I am at a loss to reiterate it in shorthand (or even in long form, for that matter). The film fuses inverted temporal sequencing and melodrama with graphic violence (including an opening shootout worthy of Peckinpah, although I?m not sure he would have made this movie), hardboiled dialogue, ridiculous coincidences, a missing gun, strippers, prostitutes, the Russian mafia, corrupt cops, a hockey rink, John Wayne, a surprisingly frank sex scene, and a subplot about child abduction so strange and unsettling that it almost needs to be seen to be believed. This picture has plot enough for three films, and puts so much chaos and incident into its first fifteen minutes that I wasn?t sure I would make it to the end. However, I did manage to adjust to the movie?s tonality, which is a good thing, because Kramer proceeds to overload his narrative with so many complications that one will either settle in and accept the film on its intended level, or reject it altogether. I enjoyed it for what it was: an utterly preposterous, ultra-violent potboiler crafted with skill and a kind of giddy, pop indulgence. It is not the first film I?d recommend if you were interested in seeing a great picture (Tommy Lee Jones' "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," and Michael Winterbottom?s "Tristram Shandy" are two superb movies playing in limited release), but if you can appreciate excess (as I have been known to do on occasions, when it is warranted) and pulp-infused grotesquerie, then you might (operative word) enjoy "Running Scared."

While I don?t know that I can praise its artistry, I do admire its craft, as well as the level of energy with which it is infused. I recall Pauline Kael?s observation that "films are so rarely great art that if we can?t appreciate great trash, there is little reason for us to go." That is something to keep in mind when one attends a film such as "Running Scared," which would be easy to slam, but is, in its way, actually very effective.

 

Wasnt there a 'Running Scared' starring Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines?

 

^Yeah. That movie is actually very good.

The commercials for this one reminded me of Batman and Robin.