Running Scared

The beginning of this film reminds me somewhat of the opening of “Arlington Road,” based on the screenplay that won Ehren Kruger the Nicholl Fellowship from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Like “Arlington Road,” however, this film has some elements that work well, and others that don’t. Joey Gazelle (Paul Walker) leaves a building with Oleg Yugorsky (Cameron Bright), who seems to have been injured. We know nothing about either of them at this point, or how they ended up in whatever jeopardy appears to have befallen them.

The film immediately switches to stylized opening credits that suggest a mood not resembling anything that follows. “Eighteen Hours Earlier,” we are informed, Gazelle finds himself caught in a setup during what was to be a routine drug deal. It turns out that one of the masked men, killed in the massive shootout that ensues, was a cop. Joey realizes he’ll have to hide the gun used to kill the officer.

Gazelle goes home to his wife, Teresa (Vera Farminga), and their son, Nicky (Alex Neuberger), and hides the gun in the basement. He has a mandatory sex scene that’s mildly graphic which, like much of this film, exists purely to titillate. None of this seems to bother Nicky, but we’re given an entirely different picture of Oleg’s parents, Ivan (John Noble) and Mila (Ivana Milicevic). Ivan is the stereotype of the terribly bad father who embraces macho hero figures (John Wayne, in this case). Mila is the subservient eastern European mother.

We’re thrust toward this difference of perspective in a very pedestrian manner: Notice that most, if not all, scenes of Teresa and Joey are medium to wide, with consistent lighting throughout the frame (at times incredibly bright). Ivan and Mila, on the other hand, are shown in close-ups, at oblique angles in chiaroscuro lighting. We’re being forced to immediately infer, of course, that while the Gazelles, drowned in light, are fundamentally good, there’s something especially sinister, suspicious and sleazy about the Yugorskys.

Fed up with his father’s brutality, Oleg takes matters into his own hands and shoots Ivan — using the gun Joey hid, discovered when Oleg and Nikki watched Joey hide it. Now here’s where I get a bit confused as to what the director’s trying to achieve. He shoots each scene in high contrast, high grain, to give it the amateur’s misconception of an “artsy” appearance… and then he resorts to a special effects sequence that “rewinds” back through time with Gazelle in the room visualizing how the incident occurred. This is one example of a technique that, in and of itself, works — just not in this movie.

Oleg and Nicky end up hiding the gun, but as luck would have it, Joey’s attempt to recover it fails as someone else has picked it up. From there, the film spins into two or three tangential subplots. One involves a mysterious, scraggly guy who finds Oleg and uses him to recover some drugs. Another involves a confrontation between Oleg and a pimp whose introduction exists mainly to set up a needless reappearance in a tacked-on afterthought of an ending. But the strangest subplot by far involves a family that finds Oleg in the back of their van as he’s hiding out to evade the mobsters out looking for him.

You’ll be wondering about some incredible clairvoyance on the part of several characters. Oleg seems to immediately find the one vehicle that’s unlocked. Later, mobsters looking all over the city for Joey manage to know exactly where to find him… How? It’s never explained. When Joey and Oleg are confronted by mobsters toward the end of the film, the mobsters are assisted by hockey stick-wielding maniacs. Watch as they completely disappear, leaving the other mobsters unaided until the last minute where they magically seem to rematerialize out of nowhere.

There’s a great deal of graphic violence and gratuitously injected nudity in the film, which makes the weirdest subplot tilt toward the prurient interest. I’d like to discuss it but I’m afraid there would be spoilers involved… so, if need be, skip this part and return to the review after you’ve seen the movie:

Oleg finds himself the captive of a couple who are pedophiles. We’re not talking about the usual fat guy with horn-rimmed glasses, still living in his mom’s basement and driving a beat up van with no windows. No, these folks are beyond creepy because their grotesqueries are masked behind a sanitized veneer. When this subplot reaches its climax I began to wonder about the audience. On the one hand, I expected them to applaud. But what does that say about us as human beings? There’s something films like this reflect in our nature… that we seem to delight in propped up monsters that give the protagonist an excuse to behave like one.

That isn’t to say it wasn’t a genuinely disturbing sequence with an honest outcome that, provided the same scenario, wouldn’t elicit any different a reaction from many otherwise sane parents. It has the detriment of being inserted into a film at such a tangent to the main story that it doesn’t make sense except for one remark made by Teresa to Joey. She tells Joey that he isn’t a bad person. She says she has not seen true evil until that night. And you’ll believe her when she says it.

Components of this film work, but not together in this arrangement. I feel as though, had the film been turned inside-out, with the pedophilia subplot as the main subject, it would have worked much better. Then it could have unfolded without any of the leveraging of lurid fascination occuring in “Running Scared”, but rather the genuine development of absolute disgust at the examination and revelation in the underlying nature of evil. Then, when the wife’s footnote comes along, it would arrive at a moment in the film where it isn’t glossed over just so we can return to more violence, but framed in silence thereafter so we can be left to ruminate on the contrast between criminal greed, and abject malevolence.

Running Scared • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 • Running Time: 122 minutes • MPAA Rating: R for pervasive strong brutal violence and language, sexuality and drug content. • Distributed by New Line Cinema