Running Scared

dir: Wayne Kramer
[img_assist|nid=831|title=Who dares call me a bad actor while I'm holding a gun, eh?|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=337|height=500]
Running Scared is two hours long, and over the course of those two hours it tries to ensure that at least some element will offend everyone. It is loud, extremely violent, profane, visually aggressive and completely over the top. It is thus, for me, a very entertaining film.

It also has an entertaining performance by Paul Walker, which I never thought were words I would ever write down in a review. As an actor I’ve generally considered him to be the acting equivalent of elevator music, though now that I’ve used that phrase, I’m trying to recall the last time I heard elevator music. I don’t think it’s been in the last fifteen years, so there could be an entire confused generation of people who’ve never heard of elevator music (or muzak, as it used to be known), and are now despondent and heartbroken. For that I am truly sorry.

Whatever. All I’m trying to say is that Paul Walker is a light beer. He’s tofu with margarine. He’s boiled water. He’s the Queen’s annual Christmas Day speech, he’s John Howard’s imagination, he’s a phone conversation with an aged relative who you don’t know that well, he’s a poodle, a potted plant, a sprig of cauliflower, the colour beige, he’s a minivan, he’s the premise on reality tv programs, and the clichés at the end of a news program having to do with cats caught in trees or the hopes and dreams of celebrities.

But, here at least, he’s off the hook. He swears like a sailor, commits many acts of gratuitous violence, and runs around like a crazy thing as the main character Joey Gazelle. Joey is a low-level mobster in New Jersey for a crew that never runs into the Sopranos at any stage. Instead they have trouble with the Brighton Beach Russian mafia.

When a drug deal goes bad, as if any drug deal ever goes right in movies, Joey is tasked with disposing of an incriminating shiny gun, which can sink his boss, legally speaking. Instead of disposing of it, he stashes it in his home, not reckoning with the awesome power of a child’s curiousity.

Joey’s son’s best friend Oleg (Cameron Bright) lives next door, and has an abusive stepdad. The stepdad is a John Wayne obsessed tweaker (meaning a crystal meth addict) and producer of his own supply who slaps Oleg’s mother around. When the kid steals the shiny gun from Joey’s hiding place in order to teach stepdad a lesson, this places Joey in what is known as an untenable position, meaning that his nuts are in the wringer.

See, if the cops get their hands on it (the gun, not Joey’s nuts), they’ll be able to link Joey and his crew via Oleg to the shooting of the stepdad and the drug deal that went wrong. If Joey’s mob buddies find out it was the gun he was supposed to get rid of, then he and his family are dead.

What proceeds from here, as Joey tries to track down Oleg and the gun, and Oleg tries to stay out of trouble, is an insane series of adventures springing from coincidence and chance encounters. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and incredibly so. Ridiculously, magnificently, insanely so.

There’s this whole subgenre of films whose plots rest on what happens when people are trying to track a particular thing down (think of the classic Italian neo-realist film The Bicycle Thief), but even within it there’s a sub-subgenre devoted to what happens when a gun goes missing. PTU by Johnny To, Chinese film The Missing Gun, Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel, the classic Kurosawa flick Stray Dog, one of the many plots in the film Magnolia, all had as their premise the loss of a gun. None of those other directors thought about filling it with as much goddamn swearing and violence as this one did, though, that has to be said.

To fail to report the fact that the plot and the stuff that happens along the way are absurd would do a disservice to you, my faithful readers. There are plotholes so large they make the Grand Canyon-sized holes in the hearts of politicians everywhere look microscopic in comparison. But I didn’t care, mostly because the film moves at such a breakneck speed, and because it’s so darn transgressive.

Oleg's journey through this one night is fraught with peril and insanity, as he tussles with insane crack heads, maniacal pimps and hos, but the story decides he hasn’t had enough and puts him in the most insanely awful position possible when he gets accidentally picked up by an evil pair of kiddie fiddlers called Dez and Edele.

This allows Joey’s wife Teresa (Vera Fermiga) to get in on the action in a film already overflowing with plot twists and extreme setups for insane resolutions. She gets a call from Oleg and has to deal with some pretty sick characters in order to try to get him free. I can’t even begin to describe how profoundly out of left field this comes from, and how fucked up the whole subplot is.

In fact, there’s a pretty sick sensibility permeating the entire film, with a particular sadistic glee in many of the scenarios, as if the people involved are so proud of themselves for thinking up some of the nastiest ways of doing things possible. There’s a kind of virtuosity and charm to this level of overamped immaturity, though I can see it irritating the hell out of people with low thresholds for this kind of ugly material.

A particular scene, where Joey tries to comfort Oleg about his shitty fate in having such awful parents shows how different the aesthetic is in this film compared to similar movies. Instead of giving him a speech about how it gets better in time, or, there’ll always be someone there to look after him, he relates his own story of waiting until he was 14 before beating the crap out of his own wife-beating father with a baseball bat, and that once the kid is old enough and has enough physical strength, he should do the same. What a mentor!

The frenetic action rarely lets up long enough for you to think about how unlikely it is that the sequence of connected events could happen, or to get antsy over how often kids are placed in moral and mortal danger in this film. Though long, the makers manage to keep things rolling along in a pretty thrilling way, and I have to admit to being caught up in the ride. And being pretty entertained after the first half-hour.

But this isn’t Shakespeare, or anything of deeper significance. You’re not going to come away from this experience with any greater appreciation of the sanctity of life or the wonderfulness of parenthood, or anything else for that matter, except maybe an STD. In fact, you’ll be lucky if you remember anything that happened five minutes after the movie finishes.

But, if you’re a bit of a sick puppy, you might have enjoyed yourself, at least, along the way.

8 times films like this are the equivalent of anonymous sex in a dirty alleyway out of 10

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“It's all about the children.” – Edele, Running Scared.