Running Scared (2006)

Wayne Kramer's Running Scared arrives with a title that promises urgency and delivers something closer to a seizure. A drug deal between New Jersey mobsters and a Jamaican crew collapses into gunfire, two corrupt detectives die, and a low-ranking thug named Joey Gazelle is handed a revolver and told to make it disappear. He hides it in his basement. A ten-year-old steals it. The rest of the night is a downward spiral through crack dens, snuff films, a hockey rink shootout, and a great deal of screaming. Kramer has spoken of the film as a Grimm's fairy tale nightmare, with Pinocchio and Hansel and Gretel threaded through the carnage. The scaffolding is decorative. The engine is mayhem.

The cast is uniformly white, save for gang members who exist as ethnic wallpaper. No relationship here is examined for its politics. Vera Farmiga's Teresa rescues a boy from a pair of child-murdering filmmakers and then executes them, which is the film's entire moral position, stated once and never revisited. Paul Walker plays an undercover agent whose cover is the only identity the plot cares about. There is no commentary on wealth, no environmental anxiety, no gender-equity argument, no examination of race despite the film's casual deployment of it. The movie has appetites, not beliefs.

Critics split, as critics do. Roger Ebert admired its willingness to vault past every limit and keep going. Others found the violence pornographic and the tone a mashup of Tarantino leftovers. It earned $9.4 million against a $15 million budget, which is a verdict of its own. The residue is a nasty, propulsive, oddly beautiful piece of filmmaking with nothing to teach and no one to correct. It hurts people on camera for two hours, then fakes a funeral. Some films want to improve you. This one wants to exhaust you, and it succeeds.