Review: Run Away From 'Running Scared'

'Running Scared' (R) (zero out of four)

The lowlights are too many to narrow down -- though the lowest of them all might be the torture of a man with a cascade of flying hockey pucks to the face, or the husband smashing his wife's face to the carpet, twisting it in their overturned dinner. Nah, for my money, the most reprehensible moment in this marathon of obscenity is surely the dying man who stands up to reveal a shotgun wound that opens up to his ribcage.

To call "Running Scared" one of the worst movies I have ever encountered, would be far too blunt. But a good dose of blunt is just what anyone, anywhere, with any inclination of seeing this film, desperately needs.

"Running Scared" is really just a freak show with the gall to take itself seriously -- an insulting concept told in appalling fashion. In the first five minutes, we're indoctrinated into the film's real concerns as a run-of-the-mill shootout is given an added, shocking finesse. Men are shot in the groin and the head, murdered in slow--motion and execution style, while ears are bitten off and blood splatters on the faces.

Director Wayne Kramer ("The Cooler") seems to take extra pleasure in adopting the bullet's perspective, and is so intent on zooming in on carnage and the moment of death that this could easily double as a two-hour anatomy course.

Following him back home, Joey (Paul Walker) continues the film's tribute to testosterone. He pulls up in his convertible, scratches his unshaven chin, bestows his son with tickets to the big game, hoists his wife up on the washing machine for a little foreplay and then goes down to the basement to store the scandalous gun that killed an undercover cop.

Ah yes, the perfect man.

When the gun goes missing, is involved in a murder, and then starts floating around the city, Joey panics that he'll be killed for letting it get out. The fact that a kid stole it doesn't really seem to bother him -- he just packs up his own son in a car and speeds off into the night.

The ensuing string of absurd coincidences -- involving a druggie who lives in a public park, a pair of cheerful pedophiles and even a café janitor who passes the gun on to, of course, a pimp -- might be so absurd as to be funny if they hadn't started with a 10-year-old's bruises. Yes, the heartless mind that wrote this stupid little film -- Kramer again -- used child abuse, and also child molestation, as the basis for his macho action epic.

Everything is so heavy-handed here that "Running Scared" looks exactly like what a "Saturday Night Live" parody of an overdone thriller would be. But Walker is clearly working far too hard at playing "tough" for this to be a B-movie spoof, and this movie quickly moves beyond silly to tiresome and, finally, insulting, as it stops the bloodbath and its game of hot potato to give us a melodramatic speech about mail--order brides here, and a lecture on the "nature of evil" there.

In the best mob thrillers, we dig the rough guys because they seem slightly above the world they wade through. They're calculated businessmen, with guns instead of briefcases.

But in "Running Scared," all we have are thugs, creeps and a rotating array of white trash, who confuse mindless grits for thoughtful guts and a director who mistakes an alternating pattern of loud and quiet for a story.

I hated this film, which rejoices in not only slathering us in the worst of human nature and human depravity, but then giggles in bringing out those very things in us. I hated the way it twists a cautionary tale about kids with guns into an epic celebration that, in 2006 America, guns are the only answer for incest, revenge and, hell, even a lack of health insurance.

I hated these people -- hated imaging that they existed, hated seeing the world through their eyes. And if you insist on experiencing this nightmare, you should hate them too.