Every once in a while, you walk out of a movie thinking to yourself, “Wow. That’s really messed up.”
“Running Scared” will do that to you.
Here’s why: A 10-year-old boy at the heart of the story shoots his wife-beating stepdad, watches a prostitute assaulted by her pimp and is kidnapped by child pornographers who dismember their victims after filming.
That’s just for starters. Elsewhere in the story, the boy is forced at gunpoint to pull a bag of heroin syringes from a toilet, watch an informant get shot through the head and see his only protector held prone on the ice while hockey players slap-shot pucks at his head.
Running home to his mother’s arms, he finds the lawn on fire from an explosion in Mom and Dad’s backyard meth lab.
Perhaps I seem humorless about all this. You should know the part where the auto mechanic’s crotch is lit on fire with his own welding torch had me smiling on the inside.
That hockey rink finale of “Running Scared” ends in the shooting deaths of at least eight New Jersey goombahs. Or maybe it was 10 – I forget how many players are on a side, these international rules are so confusing. Writer-director Wayne Kramer shoots it like a zombie movie …. “Night of the Living Enforcer”?
Confusion reigns in “Running Scared.” (I had to think for a moment about that unfortunate auto mechanic, momentarily mixing him up with a cop who also was damaged in the groinal region.) Primarily, my confusion is what the heck happened to Kramer, whose initial effort “The Cooler” was a delightful, intelligent Vegas romp and a favorite at the 2004 Denver film festival.
Here Kramer has written a hellish hybrid crossing “Goodfellas” with “After Hours,” or “The Sopranos” with “Saw II.” Paul Walker plays Joey Gazelle, a good family man whose commute home one day is interrupted by a drug buy resulting in at least six deaths. Being a mob errand boy, Joey agrees to hide the guns.
His kid and the neighbor find the guns and put one of them to good use, shooting the neighbor’s evil stepdad. Then the gun goes missing, Joey’s in big trouble with the made men, and after that it’s all snub-nose pimps and nickel-plated hookers.
You may have heard unkind references to New Jersey as a toilet stall. But I can guarantee you will not again see so many of New Jersey’s actual toilet stalls depicted in a movie.
When wayward child confronts the stepdad he shot, he says, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I missed.” Gets you right there in the ulcer, doesn’t it?
Kramer has tried to soften the 400 F-bomb blows of his odd creation by claiming it’s a modern Grimm fairy tale; Joey and the boys (Cameron Bright and Alex Neuberger) go “through the looking glass” into a nightmarish underworld.
Please, in the name of all profanity, don’t take that to mean the kids should come along and bring their favorite plush toy. “Running Scared” is about as hard an “R” rating as you can get, with buckets of blood, full- frontal nudity and swearing that would peel gum from the sidewalk. Even in Hoboken.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
* | “Running Scared”
R for extreme violence, language, nudity and drug situations|2 hours|THRILLER|Written and directed by Wayne Kramer ; starring Paul Walker, Chazz Palminteri, Cameron Bright and Vera Farmiga|Opens today at area theaters.
