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Contains very strong bloody violence and languageScarface meets The Brothers Grimm in Wayne Kramer's hopeless follow-up to The Cooler. Paul Walker, looking slightly less blonde than usual, makes a bid to be taken seriously as a small-time gangster charged with disposing of a gun used in a police killing. Unfortunately, he's reckoned without his son's best friend, who nicks the weapon, puts a bullet through his Russian gangster dad and runs off into the night.
Thus the stage is set for a lurid mystery tour tour through Kramer's seedy cityscape, a neighbourhood populated exclusively by pimps, prostitutes, crack hounds, mobsters, tramps and bent coppers. It makes Sin City look like Disneyland. Kramer sees his story as a modern fairytale, with Walker and son lurching from crisis to crisis, caught in a travelogue of escalating stupidity.
Everything about Running Scared is overbaked, from the operatic excess of the violence to the hysterically one-dimensional characters. Chazz Palminteri sweats like a cheese as a corrupt detective, but the most memorable villains are a pair of paedophile child killers, and wow, these guys are evil. I mean, wow. They're so evil that they hang fun-sized body bags in the wardrobe. They're so evil that they film their murders and give the DVDs star ratings. That's how amazingly evil they are.
"RELENTLESS RICOCHETTING CAMERAWORK"
We haven't even mentioned the hockey puck torture scene, or the relentless ricochetting camerawork, or the multiple last minute switcheroos - it's got more endings than Lord Of The Rings. Basically, if you can get past the gut reaction of nausea and outrage, Running Scared makes for pretty effective comedy.
