Running Scared

The quote on the front of the Running Scared DVD reads "It makes Kill Bill look like Sesame Street." As Quentin Tarantino himself might say, that's a bold statement. It's also fairly inaccurate, in that Running Scared and Kill Bill share only the most superficial of qualities - a delight in flamboyant violence and a densely-packed international cast of thugs who cuss like sailors. Wayne Kramer's crime thriller far more closely resembles another Tarantino-scripted genre piece, the Tony Scott-directed True Romance.

In fact, the Scott comparison, overall, is far more accurate. Kramer cribs many of his favored camera tricks and set-ups directly from Scott, particularly the recent T.S. epics Man on Fire and Domino. Add in a touch of Guy Ritchie's gangster riffs and a dash of David Fincher's steely, fluid eye candy and you've good a decent sense for the visuals in Kramer's feature. Like all those movies, Running Scared is a frenetic, adrenaline-fueled journey through a seedy, corrupt circle of sociopathic criminals occupying a crude, nihilistic universe of endless cruelty.

Though it's never as sly or fun as Lock, Stock, I will say that the movie's far more enjoyable than Scott's recent work (or, really, anything he's done since True Romance.) Kramer's aesthetic sense may not extend far beyond what other "hip" directors have already done, but his writing is sharp, occasionally very funny and best of all unexpected. The story of low-level mobster Joey Gazelle (Paul Walker) and his overnight search for a hot pistol always manages to find a new spin on this old-fashioned material. The result, at 121 minutes, gets a bit tiring by the end, but always remained watchable and even a bit disarming. An overall more enjoyable experience than I expected by a good measure.



I'll dance around the plot a bit, because most of the fun of the film is slowly realizing just how far Kramer's going to push these dire, grisly scenarios. What begins as a straight-forward chase movie - with Joey's own compatriots, a crooked cop (Chazz Palminteri) and the Russian Mafia all gunning for him after he loses a vital piece of evidence - develops into a crushing, dark night of the soul that comes to seem inescapable.

After a dizzying opening scene, in which Joey and his partners are held up by corrupt cops in ski masks, Kramer takes his time in developing his haunted, miserable characters. Joey and his beautiful but hard wife Teresa (Vera Farmiga) are raising their son Nick (Alex Neuberger) in a rough neighborhood. Nick's best friend, Oleg (Cameron Bright, who plays the kid in Birth and X-Men: The Last Stand and every other goddamn movie that doesn't already feature Dakota Fanning) lives right next door with his former Moscow prostitute mother (Ivana Milicevic) and vile, abusive stepfather (Karel Roden).

Roden's character exudes pure malice and tips you off early what kind of scenarios will follow. A maniac who worships John Wayne in between beating his wife and burning his stepson, he will eventually be transformed into a sympathetic character. (You may remember Milicevic, by the way, from her appearance on "Seinfeld," in which she played the beautiful wife of the pro shop clerk who sold Jerry an expensive racket and then turned out to stink at tennis. I kept thinking about this during the movie, which was kind of distracting, but not really Milicevic or Kramer's fault).

Complications arise after Oleg shoots his stepfather with Joey's gun, the same pistol used to murder police officers earlier that day. Oleg takes off, and of course Joey has to find him before anyone else, so he can reclaim the evidence and make this whole unfortunate situation disappear. Otherwise, it's lights out for our anti-hero.

Kramer rides this simple premise for all its worth. I was reminded in an odd way of Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, a movie that developed a charming comic universe out of the most straight-forward of scenarios. Running Scared is certainly not the same heedless, silly good time kind of movie, but it does build up an impressive number of strange, beguiling sequences.

A few elements I particularly appreciated:

- Kramer actually gives Joey's wife Teresa some stuff to do. For a while, the movie actually uses them as dual protagonists, cutting back and forth as Joey goes after the missing gun and Teresa hunts down the missing boy. Teresa's adventure in particular kind of steals the whole film, and would work just as well divorced from the larger story as a short film. Farmiga's really terrific in these scenes, turning this woman whom we've previously seen only as a dutiful wife and mother into a ferocious vigilante. She'll next appear in Martin Scorsese's The Departed, so apparently she's already on to bigger and better things.

- None of the characters fall back on obvious cliches. Even the Italian mobsters, possibly the most difficult kinds of characters to provide distinctive personalities at this point, feel a bit more natural and complete than usual. When in doubt, Krmaer just makes someone stand out by being brutally insane, which tends to keep you on your toes.

- Appropriately for its subject matter, the movie is violent. And not just in a "lots of people get shot" way. In a Verhoeven-esque splatterhouse kind of way. Many of the film's primary relationships revolve purely around violence - a guy will walk up to another guy and just start beating the shit out of him. There's so many gushing arterial sprays, the fake blood guy deserves billing above the title. Fortunately, the violent scenes are creative, with Kramer attempting to seek out new ways to crush skulls that haven't already appeared in 100 similar movies. Whether or not he fully succeeds is open to debate, but you've got to give it up to the guy for trying.

I fear we're reaching the breaking point for this whole branch of the crime genre. These quirky hard-edged darkly comic ensemble gangster stories just don't have the shock value or spark of originality they did when Pulp Fiction was playing Cannes. To get the same effect as the 90's incarnations, Kramer has to go way way way over the top. As I said, I appreciate the effort, and he comes up with a film that's really watchable and sporadically really enjoyable. It certainly puts the tired Layer Cake to shame. And I didn't even hate Paul Walker as much as usual, so he's doing something right. But it will take a lot more than some snazzy scene transitions and shotgun blasts to the chest to revitalize this particular strain of movies. Sidelong Tarantino references may not be totally out of line, but I'm not exactly ready to declare this guy next-in-line for the King Geek title just yet.