Running Scared (2006)

[5]

I watched this movie several weeks ago and I still don’t quite know how to review it. An assault on the senses? Psychotic in tone? Punishingly serendipitous? Insane?… Yes, it’s all those things. But it’s also a riveting in its own kind of way — completely bonkers, but I simply couldn’t turn away.

Paul Walker is a thug (I guess?) who hides in his basement the weapons his posse use in their crimes. But his son and the next door neighbor kid discover the guns, and the neighbor kid steals one. Then the neighbor kid shoots his asshole dad and Walker freaks out because the gun can be traced to the crime he recently committed. But the neighbor kid runs off with the gun, so Walker takes his kid on a trip through the city at night to try and find the neighbor kid and get back the gun, but along the way, the police, the mob, some Russians, a kindly prostitute, a nasty pimp, and even some pedophiles get mixed up in the plot.

The film starts out like a Tarantinoesque popcorn movie that gives no indication of how nuts things are going to get. An hour and a half later, we have Vera Farmiga, as Walker’s wife, trying to single-handedly rescue the neighbor kid and two other children from a pair of pedophiles in a highrise apartment building. Writer/director Wayne Kramer turns that sequence into a dark fairytale — unlike anything else in the film, and completely unrelated to the rest of the plot in any way. It’s mystifying. It’s structurally inappropriate and unnecessary to the movie — but it’s also probably the best part of the movie.

This weird-ass movie climaxes the only way it could — in a big showdown on a black-light hockey court where much blood is shed. And even after that big sequence, the film has a few major twists up its sleeve.

What else can I say about Running Scared? It’s like eight disparate movies from different genres were dumped in a blender and this is the oh-so-chunky smoothie that resulted from that experiment. I’m pretty sure it’s all on purpose. I don’t think it’s a good movie — it’s a hot mess. But if you’re into off-the-wall shit, it might be just the right hot mess for you.

With Cameron Bright, Chazz Palminteri, and John Noble.