No Surrender Cinema: Running Scared (2006)
He’d been in some fast and furious situations before, but in 2006 Paul Walker was Running Scared! Buckle your seat belt and come along for the ride with No Surrender Cinema as I take a look at an eccentric crime thriller released before the Fast franchise re-emerged to become one of the most popular film series of all time!
Don’t go getting this Running Scared confused with the Billy Crystal/Gregory Hines buddy cop comedy from ’86 (which can be hard to do when they’re running on cable simultaneously). This one’s a lot lighter on the comedy and much heavier on the action. Walker’s Joey Gazelle is a petty thug and mafia errand boy who finds himself in the midst of a drug deal gone bad. Even worse, the guys who made this deal turn into a massacre were corrupt cops. With dead cops and drug dealers splattered all over the room, Gazelle and his goombah’s Tommy (Johnny Messner) and Sal (Michael Cudlitz) flee the scene of the crime, and Tommy instructs Joey to get rid of the guns from the shootout, that way no blowback can come their way. Rather than toss the guns into the river or throw them into an incinerator, Joey does the not so smart thing and brings them home with him, although he is smart enough to keep them hidden from his wife and son. What Joey doesn’t realize is that his son and his son’s friend Oleg see where Joey stashes the guns, and that Joey’s problems are about to get a whole lot worse.
It turns out that Oleg, who is the Gazelle’s next door neighbor, is being beaten by his John Wayne obsessed stepfather Anzor, the nephew of a Russian mobster. Oleg’s mother Mila (Ivana Milicevic, Banshee) does nothing to help her son, due to the abuse she suffers as well. This causes Oleg to take one of the guns that he saw Joey hiding and use it as protection from his stepfather’s wrath. When another argument begins to escalate into physical abuse, Oleg fires a shot that wounds his stepfather and goes through the wall, into the Gazelle home. Joey thinks he and his family may be in danger, but only after making his way next door does he realize the gravity of the situation. Knowing that the gun can link him and his crew to a couple of dead cops, Joey and his young son Nicky head out into the night to find Oleg and the gun before anybody else can.
Hampering Joey’s search for Oleg is the variety of characters that Oleg comes across. The poor kid seems to be a magnet for every deviant that’s on the loose, a list that includes vagrants, druggies, pimps, and hookers. Eventually, the cops catch up to Oleg and release him into Anzor’s custody, but it’s not long before Oleg is back on the run. It’s during this second escapade that Oleg encounters a married couple, Dez and Edele, who don’t seem at all scared that this young child was hiding out in their van. Instead of calling the cops or keeping Oleg at a distance from their own kids (who were in the backseat), they seem to be incredibly trusting and allow Oleg to accompany them home. What follows is the most uncomfortable portion of Running Scared; Oleg’s Spidey Sense starts to go off once he sees the giant playroom complete with costumes and video camera inside Dez and Edele’s apartment. Just as things start getting creepy between the adults and the other 2 kids (due to what we hear, not anything shown), Oleg excuses himself to the bathroom and contacts Joey’s wife Teresa (Vera Farmiga). Teresa is a tough neighborhood chick, so she’s no slouch, and when she barges into the apartment and sees what’s going on (Dez and Edele are snuff film making pedophiles, aka two of the Worst People In The World, and the two kids are their most recent victims to be) she calls the cops to report hearing shots fired, right before she kills both of them herself.
While Teresa is busy becoming a vigilante to rescue Oleg and the other two kids, Joey is having a hell of a time trying to track down the missing gun. This pistol has changed hands more times in one night than the WWE 24/7 Title, which is no small feat. Joey also has to deal with another obstacle, since Rydell (Chazz Palminteri), one of the dirty cops from the shootout earlier, is pressing the Mafia and trying to stir up dissension by saying that he saw Joey with Anzor earlier and he knows that the same gun was used to shoot him. This just adds to the pressure that Joey’s feeling, and he spends the night chasing down every lead he can, until Tommy and Sal intervene. Tommy berates Joey, but it turns out to be a swerve, as Sal is the one who winds up with a bullet in his head because it’s been found out he was Rydell’s informant all along.
The culmination of the night’s events take place inside a hockey rink, where the Russian and Italian mobs are waiting on Tommy, Joey, and Oleg. Joey’s boss (and Tommy’s father) Frankie had mentioned earlier that he had some business going on with the Russian crew, so these matters had to be handled with care. Anzor starts to beat Oleg in front of Joey, and when Joey tries to protect Oleg, he’s pinned down to the ice and hit in the face with repeated slapshots from Ivan’s hockey player henchmen! Ivan orders Anzor to kill Oleg for the trouble he’s caused, but Anzor reveals the John Wayne tattoo on his back and makes his last stand before being killed by his uncle. Before Ivan can do the same to Oleg, Joey spins a story about Frankie ordering him to give the gun to Oleg and encourage him to shoot Anzor due to his meth dealings, since he lives on Mafia turf. Words are exchanged and much blood is spilled, and this is also where we get the first of two big twists that give Running Scared a satisfying payoff.
Running Scared flew under a lot of people’s radar, but I consider it to be Walker’s best role outside of the Fast and Furious films. Better than his high school alpha male roles in Varsity Blues and She’s All That, and better than his “other” action blockbuster, Into The Blue. I’m sure someone is going to read this and throw a Tammy and the T-Rex reference into my mentions, and while I do enjoy that film for its absurdity, I’m comfortable in saying Walker went on to much bigger and better things. Running Scared took him a little further out of his comfort zone because Joey isn’t the most likable guy, he’s just the hero of the story by default.
The other thing that stands out about Running Scared is the way the film was shot. There’s a lot of darkness, jump cuts, flashing imagery, and scenes that quickly hop from one to the next. It’s a format that we’ve seen done in horror films like the Saw series, and it works here because without it I think Running Scared would feel a little redundant. Joey and Oleg’s simultaneous journeys were essentially the same; bouncing from unsavory character to unsavory character with little progress made towards the endgame. The climax in the hockey rink, with the blacklight ice and the blue tint on the scene sets it apart from other epic shootouts. That and the use of hockey pucks as torture devices make it a sight to behold. The one scene that didn’t have the flashy, music video filming format was Teresa’s confrontation with Dez and Edele in their playroom (kill room), which I’m inclined to think was on purpose because it allowed the discomfort of those characters and that setting to sit with the viewer moreso than the gunplay throughout the film.
If you’re interested in checking out Running Scared, you can find it on the Cinemax family of channels and On Demand right now, but make sure you’re getting the right film, because someone over at Cinemax decided that having both this and the 1986 Running Scared on the schedule at the same time would be a good move. I guess they’re not worried about confusion in the marketplace when they’re the ones causing it. If you don’t have cable you can snag a copy of the Blu-ray or DVD, and it does tend to pop up on streaming apps pretty often, most recently on the free Tubi app. However you decide to watch it, this is a film that is well worth the watch. Even with its modernized style of production, Running Scared feels like a classic exploitation flick. Graphic action, sleazy overtones, and everyone from the criminals to the kids are cursing. Picture it as Quentin Tarantino meets Cannon Films. Running Scared wasn’t afraid to step outside of the box, and I hate seeing it lost in the shuffle as the years go on. It’s gritty, it’s pulpy, and it’s something you should see for yourself as soon as you’re able to.
