Leading Ladies: February 2006

Running Scared

Stars: Paul Walker, Vera Farmiga, Johnny Messner
Director: Wayne Kramer
Rating: R

Barring one dissenter in the bunch, this week's female critics are not feeling the love they felt for last week's Paul Walker adventure, Eight Below. In fact, the women mostly agree that this graphic and violent drama, about a mob errand guy (Walker) who may have good intentions but whose carelessness ultimately lands his family and a neighbor child in danger, should be buried six feet below.

The New York Times's Manohla Dargis says, "Even a talented lead couldn't save [writer and director]... Kramer from himself. As a writer, he may have fashioned a genre-busting screenplay, one that has its postmodern cake and eats it, too, but as a director he proves himself as blood simple, if generally less adept, as any Hollywood hire."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek says this "is the kind of movie in which women and little kids get smacked around a lot ‑- hard ‑- so that the audience will cheer wildly when their abusers get wasted. It's lower on the food chain than a mere exploitation picture, because it clings so desperately to the notion that it's a serious movie about violence; it doesn't even have enough integrity to serve up cheap, sick thrills for their own sake."

And the Los Angeles Times's Carina Chocano says, "Running Scared is so desperate and surreally stupid that all you would have to do to see it as a brilliant sendup of everything that is corrupt, vulgar, sad, deluded and bad-for-you about Hollywood is squint."

Who can defend that? TV Guide's Maitland McDonagh argues that Running Scared is "way too violent and perversely excessive for many tastes, but there's more to its outrages than meets the eye, and that second look is well worth taking... Incredibly violent, scorchingly foulmouthed and deeply disturbing on all kinds of levels, Kramer's gore-spattered fable of innocence betrayed and ties deeper than blood is a throwback to the days of no-holds-barred exploitation films with surprisingly sophisticated ideas lurking beneath the shocks."

Female consensus: Run away from Running Scared

next : Freedomland