Movies

01:00 AM EST on Friday, February 24, 2006

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

What a difference a week makes.

Last week Paul Walker was the beatific sled dog driver-hero who desperately tried to get back to Antarctica to rescue eight left-behind dogs in Eight Below.

This week he's a foul-mouthed, panicky low-level New Jersey hoodlum on the run in director Wayne Kramer's relentlessly over-the-top crime drama Running Scared.

At least these two films show a surprising range for Walker who, up to this point, was regarded as something of a stiff. He can't be accused of that in Running Scared, but it's such an unpleasant and outrageously plotted movie I'm not sure anyone will notice after word of mouth gets around by the second week.

Kramer gained a great deal of cred with his first film, The Cooler, about an unlucky man who's hired by a Las Vegas casino owner to put a bad-luck whammy on high rollers. In the pulpy fiction of Running Scared, however, Kramer seems to be trying to out-Quentin Quentin Tarantino in body count and outlandish situations.

Running Scared takes a rub-your-nose-in-it view of violence, which might not have been a bad thing if some of it weren't also so weirdly bizarre. Although much of it takes place in Hoboken, N.J., and its environs, it might as well have been set in the hamlet of East Kumquat, the way characters keep bumping into one another or reappearing after long absences at crucial junctures. Running Scared runs on wild coincidences to propel its raging plot forward, which means that it's often running on empty.

Walker plays Joey Gazelle, the guy who is supposed to "get rid of" the guns his Mob buddies use in their murders. Only Joey hides them behind a panel in his basement. Insurance, he says, just in case.

Trouble comes fast to Joey, however, when a 10-year-old neighbor boy, Oleg (Cameron Bright of Birth), steals a shiny snub-nosed revolver from Joey's stash to shoot his nutty and oppressive Russian immigrant stepfather. The gun had been used by the Mob in a horrific slaughter at the start of the film.

Following Oleg's impulsive use of the weapon, Joey tries to find the boy and the gun before it can be found by either his Mob associates or the corrupt cops. They're led by Chazz Palminteri as a smoothly slimy detective who controls his men like a Mob kingpin.

As Kramer rummages through the underbelly of nighttime New Jersey, the wheezily asthmatic Oleg and the pursuing Joey, who has taken his 10-year-old son along for the ride into this dangerous territory, encounter the sleaziest oddball collection of characters to come along since Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. There's a pimp who smashes a hooker's face into his Cadillac's headlight, a petty crook who steals the gun from Oleg's hiding place, a violent auto mechanic who comes under fire -- literally -- for knowing too much, a neighbor who cooks crystal meth in his backyard, a wife beater with a portrait of John Wayne tattooed on his back, assorted Russian mobsters and a skater who repeatedly slams a hockey puck into Joey's battered face which is hemorrhaging blood onto the ice of a rink. Creepiest of all is a sugar-and-spice couple who produce kiddie porn in their playroom.

Oleg, Joey and his wife, Teresa (Vera Farmiga), keep running up against and into these characters, meetings that can be counted on to end in violence. At one point, Teresa tells Joey that although he may be shady, sleazy and mixed up with the wrong people, he's not evil. She knows that as she uncovers true evil on her own, thanks to a phone call from a terrified Oleg who has been kidnapped by one very strange couple.

Kramer presents much of Running Scared in grainy close-ups, using frantic film edits to pump up Joey's panicked rush to find Oleg and that missing gun. But there's so much flash to Running Scared that it overwhelms the slim plot.

This is self-conscious filmmaking. When a man is shot in the chest in Running Scared, he doesn't just fall over dead. No, he flies backwards in slow motion, the bright blue bullet casing hypnotizing us as it slowly spins in close-up in the foreground, his body drifting toward the wall behind him, finally hitting with a bloody splat. It's mesmerizing, a ballet of blood and guts.

But as Running Scared roars at breakneck speed, it becomes more about its special effects and daring camera work and less about its characters.

mjanuson@projo.com / 401-277-7276

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Running Scared

Starring: Paul Walker, Cameron Bright, Chazz Palmenteri, Vera Farmiga.

Rated: R, contains extreme violence, sex, nudity, profanity.