Running Scared | Paul Walker | 2005

Some might say Paul Walker has made a career out of imitating Keanu Reeves, same vacant look, and same voice. The Fast and The Furious was in fact a complete rip off of Point Break only with the surfboards replaced by muscle cars. Look at the final shot of Point Break and the final shot of Furious and tell me it doesn’t scream rip off. You would be forgiven for saying that Walker’s career wouldn’t last much beyond his twenties once he started to visibly age.

Director Wayne Kramer’s breakthrough was the acclaimed The Cooler from 2003. The Cooler starred William H.Macy and Maria Bello and garnered an academy award nomination for Alec Baldwin in the best supporting actor category. The film concerned a man hired by a casino because of his bad luck, which he then translates, to players in the casino. It was a tale of a loser finding love, a touching tale and had only a little violence in it. Nobody could possibly comprehend that Walker and Kramer would come up with a film so insane and hardcore as Running Scared when they teamed up for Kramer’s follow up film to The Cooler.

In a very rare instance Running Scared was released in the UK before the US, two months before in early January 2006. It didn’t get much attention and showed at a few midnight screenings and multiplexes in London. Slowly though thanks to the Internet word started to spread that Running Scared was not the run of the mill cop film that the trailer promised. When eventually it came out on DVD the people who saw it were either A) Thrilled or B) Disgusted. I have to say I side with option A.

Walker plays Joey Gazelle, a man with a wife and a young son in a Chicago suburb. Gazelle works as a low-level member of the local mob, his main job is to dispose of the guns that are used in mob hits. After one of the most violent opening scenes in recent memory Gazelle is given the weapon used by the mob bosses son to dispose of. He goes home and stashes it in his basement and sits down to dinner with his family.

Gazelle doesn’t realise that his son’s best friend and next door neighbour Oleg has taken the gun and used it on his abusive Russian speed freak father. Oleg runs off with the weapon and Gazelle must find him before the mob or the cops find the child with the weapon and find out where it came from. On his journey Oleg encounters all manner of depravity in the urban hell portrayed in the film. He befriends a prostitute and meets her murderous pimp. He encounters crack heads in the park and eventually gets kidnapped by a paedophile couple in perhaps the film’s most disturbing scene.

Along his journey Kramer uses fairytale iconography as if Oleg is adrift in some kind of haunted forest. The crack addicts are portrayed as creatures and you never see their faces just hairy shadows. In one scene in the paedophiles apartment which is made up like some kind of playhouse for kids we see one of them through a window and they appear like a goblin with pointy ears and long slender limbs. During this journey Gazelle’s mob employers get suspicious and a corrupt cop also gets in on the action not to mention the Russian Mafia who are about to wage war on the Italian mob over the whole mess. Gazelle gets increasingly desperate, chasing the gun around town and using violence as and when to get what he wants.

Running Scared is an extremely violent film, heads are blown apart, and people are shot and set on fire. In the most wince inducing sequence Gazelle is forced on to the ground of a local hockey rink whilst someone repeatedly smashes a hockey puck into his face. The language is also extremely harsh, there is something like 328 uses of the F Word along with a couple of uses of the worst word in the English language (yes the one that begins with a C). Seriously if this film were released back in 1992 or 1993 we would be talking about a denied video certificate like Reservoir Dogs. This makes Dogs look like pound puppies.

All through the film the performances are excellent. Walker in particular is a revelation as a desperate man trying to save himself and his family whilst trying to morally justify the lengths he must go to. Nothing in his previous work suggests that Walker was capable of the intense gritty performance he gives here. He is well supported by Vera Farmiga playing his feisty wife along with Chazz Palminteri as the corrupt cop and John Noble as a Russian Mafia boss.
For a film populated by evil and amoral characters it would be fairly easy to tune out and not care. The first time you watch it however you are gripped, the film is so extreme and feels so unpredictable that you are excited and a little scared to see what happens next. It is this extreme nature and unpredictability that makes the film feel fresh after years of boring supposed ‘Thrillers’.

If there is one flaw with the movie, it’s that the finale is something of a disappointment. Compared to what has gone on in the previous 115 minutes the last few scenes seem to bottle it and wrap things up in a nice convenient package.
Its incredible that such a film would be released by a major studio in this day and age and it seems that when it did come out the studio had no idea how to sell it. The trailer suggests a gritty cop thriller, which it is partly but it’s also so much more. Had New Line Cinema focused on the extreme nature of the movie then probably more people would have seen it as Eli Roth’s Hostel had just become a big hit. Sadly it was not to be and the film made little cash in the cinema despite a lot of Internet buzz. Running Scared will no doubt grow in popularity as time goes on, as it’s a cult film fans wet dream. A film that isn’t afraid to push the boundaries of what is acceptable. You may feel like a shower afterwards though.

Trivia: Thomas Jane declined the role of Joey Gazelle due to scheduling conflicts. 'Paul Walker' was a second choice.