Running Scared

Scott Hardie: “It ruled.”

Low expectations always help a movie seem better (I guess that Poseidon remake wasn't too horrible...), but how could a gritty, child-in-peril thriller with nobody's favorite movie star Paul Walker as a bottom-feeding mob bagman turn out to be this good? First, it has a method to its gruesome madness, revealed in full in the cleverly animated closing credits if you didn't catch on sooner: The movie is a gory adult fairy tale, where the babyfaced Cameron Bright (good actor for his age) encounters pimps, pedophiles, and pushers as the Brothers Grimm might have portrayed them. Second, it takes the grit into delirious, NC17-skirting excess, with graphic hedonistic sex and gunshot wounds so improbable they had to be created with CGI. An early shot of a victim-hurtling, point-blank shotgun blast shown from the gun's point of view sets the tone for a movie that's like the killer shark of Tarantino knockoffs, unable to stop swimming or it will die. If you can stomach it, it's one hell of a movie.

− April 24, 2007 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply