Running Scared Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.5

Running Scared Blu-ray Movie Review

Once Upon a Time in New Jersey

Reviewed by Michael Reuben June 10, 2013

In the end credits to Running Scared, writer/director Wayne Kramer acknowledges debts to directors Sam Peckinpah, Brian De Palma and Walter Hill. He could just as aptly have named Quentin Tarantino, Tony Scott and Guy Ritchie, all of whom have explored the cinematic territory where Running Scared is set. One might even find David Lynch lurking on the outskirts, because Kramer deliberately fashioned his film as a fairy tale, just as Lynch designed the luridly violent adventures of Sailor and Lula in Wild at Heart as a modern day variation on The Wizard of Oz. In fact, Kramer packed so much into Running Scared that New Line Cinema, which made its name marketing recognizable genres, didn't know how to market it properly. When the film was released in 2006, critics whined, audiences shrugged, and the box office died.

The poor response must have been a disappointment for Kramer after the promising reception accorded his first major feature, The Cooler (2003). With multiple award nominations, including a best supporting Oscar nod for Alec Baldwin, plus a modest profit in theaters, The Cooler appeared to herald the arrival of a new talent. After Running Scared, however, the usual muttering began about "sophomore slump" and "flash in the pan". The failure of Kramer's third film, Crossing Over, a multi-stranded narrative that didn't work despite an admirable cast, seemed to confirm the diagnosis.

But Running Scared made a strong and lasting impression on many viewers who actually saw it, and that alone should tell you something. I sometimes wonder whether the film would have done better with a less generic title (and one that had already been used by a successful Eighties buddy cop comedy starring Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines). Kramer's film needed a crazy calling card to prepare viewers for the crazed events into which it immediately throws them. Running Scared fits into a well-established B-movie tradition that includes gangster movies, film noir and exploitation cinema—all genres that were once considered disreputable and later reevaluated. De Palma's Scarface, which Running Scared explicitly references, was reviled on its initial release in 1983. Its reputation grew with time, and while Running Scared may not operate at Scarface's level, it's a slickly crafted entertainment that draws the viewer into a pulp world of danger and thrills. You're not supposed to believe it, anymore than you would a fairy tale, but fairy tales aren't fun unless, while they're being told, you play along and pretend they're real.

The anti-hero of Running Scared is Joey Gazelle (Paul Walker, uncharacteristically dirtied up and deglamorized), a soldier in New Jersey's Perello crime family. In an opening teaser, we see Joey burst out of an unidentified location cradling the limp body of a young boy who will shortly be identified as Oleg Yugorsky (Cameron Bright). Both of them are covered in blood. Joey hustles Oleg into the front seat of a car and speeds away, presumably to an emergency room. And then the story rewinds.

Eighteen hours earlier, Joey is in a hotel room with the younger Perello, Tommy (Johnny Messner), and his constant companion, Sal Franzone, a/k/a "Gummy Bear" (Michael Cudlitz). A major drug deal is in progress, when masked men burst into the room with shotguns to steal the drugs and cash. They turn out to be dirty cops led by Det. Rydell (Chazz Palminteri). In the ensuing melee, several of them are killed. (The sequence has the same frenetically chaotic quality that Tony Scott achieved in the shootout scenes of True Romance , although Kramer expressly cites Man on Fire for technical inspiration.)

As Tommy, Joey and Gummy Bear speed away from the scene, Tommy hands Joey his revolver and orders him to destroy it, because it can be connected to a cop killing. Joey returns to the modest New Jersey home he shares with his devoted but concerned wife, Teresa (the extraordinary Vera Farmiga), and precocious son, Nicky (Alex Neuberger), where he hides Tommy's pistol in the basement with the rest of his arsenal—and here is where Running Scared begins to move sideways.

Young Nicky's best friend is the aforementioned Oleg Yugorsky, who lives next door with his abused mother, Mila (Ivana Milicevic, in a vanity-free performance), and abusive stepfather, Anzor (Karel Roden), both of whom are Russian immigrants. Anzor is a crystal meth addict who cooks meth in his back yard and beats his wife and stepson routinely, which explains why Oleg prefers to remain at the Gazelle household whenever possible. Eventually, though, he has to go home, and Oleg has decided to do something about his stepfather. When he leaves the Gazelles that evening, he has secretly acquired a gun—Tommy's gun.

During dinner that night, shots ring out from the Yugorsky household, and Joey races next door, but too late. Oleg has vanished into the night carrying a gun that Joey quickly realizes is the one he was entrusted with making disappear. There are slugs embedded in the wall (and elsewhere) that ballistics can match to the bullets that killed a cop earlier that day at the drug buy. It's only a matter of time before Oleg gets picked up with the gun and tells the authorities where he got it.

Thus begins a bizarre odyssey for Joey, for Oleg and, eventually, for Teresa Gazelle, who doesn't know details but is too smart not to realize that something is terribly wrong. In Kramer's hands, the New Jersey nighttime acquires the surreal quality of the forest in a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm (a conscious intent, as Kramer makes clear with his end titles), where mysterious and often malevolent creatures lie in wait around every turn.

Among these strange inhabitants are a vicious pimp named Lester, who's a self-declared "mack daddy" (David Warshofsky) even though he happens to be white; one of Lester's girls, Divina (Idalis DeLeon), who proves to be one of the few beneficent forces on the landscape; a presence in the darkness known only as "the Shadow Man" (played by an actor whom Kramer won't identify); a dishwasher and card player named Manny (David Monteiro) and another card player named Julio, who's also a car mechanic and likes to play with fire (Thomas Rosales, Jr.); and perhaps most memorably, an apparently kindly couple with the storybook name of "Hansel", Dez and Edele (Bruce Altman and Elizabeth Mitchell), who initially appear to young Oleg as rescuers but turn out to be just the opposite.

Always lurking in the background are the two ruling forces of the kingdom, Det. Rydell, who still wants his big score, and the true head of the Perello family, Tommy's father, Frankie (Arthur J. Nascarella). Frankie, in turn, has a major deal in progress with a Russian mobster from Brooklyn, Ivan Yugorsky (Fringe's John Noble), uncle to the very same Anzor Yugorsky whose mistreatment of his stepson triggered the night's events. When the key parties finally meet at a Brighton Beach hockey rink to settle their differences, the confrontation that ensues plays out under black light shining on fluorescent paint, which lends the whole affair a cartoonish overlay. The sickly blue tint made the sequence more palatable to the MPAA, but audiences still wince.

The film does eventually circle back to the opening teaser, but by then everything that seemed apparent at the beginning is different. One of the qualities that makes Running Scared so entertaining is how Kramer keeps changing direction, although he never loses sight of his ultimate destination. Nothing in the film feels like real life, but so what? Pulp Fiction and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels aren't realistic films either. Fairy tales aren't about reality; they're about alternate worlds, and this one is a crazily interesting place to visit.

Running Scared Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Running Scared was shot on film by director Kramer's usual cinematographer, Jim Whitaker (Thank You For Smoking), who worked closely with the production design team to create a distressed and "damaged" look that relies heavily on strong shades of cyan and amber. Since Kramer confirms in his commentary that the prevalence of these two colors is intentional, anyone who wants to complain about Warner's "teal and orange revisionism" should look elsewhere. What's on this Blu-ray represents the filmmakers' intent.

Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray of Running Scared is superb, with deep blacks, crisp detail, and a careful calibration of the film's distinctive visual design, in which a few colors predominate (usually, as noted, cyan or amber), while others are desaturated, sometimes almost to the point of black-and-white. As Kramer notes in his commentary, he might not have been able to get an R rating from the MPAA without major cuts, if the red of the copious bloodshed hadn't been substantially toned down as a side effect of the cinematography.

The film's grain structure appears natural and intact, and the film seems to have been shot to accentuate its grain as a stylistic decision to emphasize the grittiness of the criminal milieu. For my taste, the effect is not at all excessive and contributes to the film's impact, but I suspect some viewers will find it objectionable. The graininess is, however, part of the original film and not a flaw in the Blu-ray transfer. At a healthy average bitrate of 28.86 Mbps, compression artifacts were not an issue.

Running Scared Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's 5.1 soundtrack, presented in lossless DTS-HD MA, is multi-layered and immersive, with constant shifts in perspective to accompany the rapid-fire editing. Cars, gunshots, shotgun blasts, breaking glass, the sound of hockey sticks hitting the ice—these and more are woven into the mix, along with frequently overlapping dialogue, profusely laced with profanity. (That the dialogue is almost always intelligible is a minor miracle.) The dynamic range is wide with deep bass extension, which services both the sound editing and the rap-laced soundtrack. The original score is by Kramer's reliable composer of choice, Mark Isham.

Running Scared Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras have been ported over from the 2006 New Line DVD.

• Commentary with Writer/Director Wayne Kramer: Kramer talks continuously and at the same feverish pace as the film's story, jumping from story points to editing choices to color schemes to acting styles. He is unstinting in his praise for his collaborators both behind and in front of the camera, and he hits on some interesting practical points that would not normally occur to the viewer, e.g., that one particular actor, despite many years of experience, had never previously been outfitted with exploding squibs and was terrified at the prospect. He also discusses the logistics of shooting much of the film in the Czech Republic (for budgetary reasons) and marrying that footage to shots captured in New Jersey. Although commentaries for recent movies are usually recorded prior to release, some of Kramer's remarks suggest that he was already getting less than favorable feedback, perhaps from test screenings, and he feels the need to explain aspects of the plot that (at least to me) require no explanation.



• Running Scared: Through the Looking Glass (480i; 1.78:1, enhanced; 18:48): This is a superior EPK that includes interviews with Kramer, Walker, Farmiga, Messner, Palminteri and producer Michael Pierce, as well as substantial on-set footage.



• Storyboard Comparison Drawn by Writer/Director Wayne Kramer (480i; 1.33:1): Kramer storyboards his own films. These are two examples of notable sequences, with the completed film playing in a window above, while the director's storyboards are displayed in a second window below.
• Hotel Room Shootout (2:55)
• Hockey Rink Shootout (2:36)



• Theatrical Trailer (480i; 1.78:1, enhanced; 2:08): "I try to live an ordinary life, but I run with a very dangerous crew."

Running Scared Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

In the "Through the Looking Glass" featurette, Kramer speaks of Running Scared as a fairy tale, but it immediately becomes clear that he uses the term broadly. For Kramer "fairy tales" encompass the Brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll and the story of Pinocchio. Kramer's cinematic tastes are similarly broad, and in Running Scared he has ranged far and wide to create his own personal version of a noirish nightmare, complete with endangered kids who sometimes have to fend for themselves against genuine monsters. It may not make your top ten list, but I guarantee you won't be bored. Highly recommended.