Review: Running Scared

I haven’t written any movie reviews lately because the majority of the stuff I watched have been crap like Pirates of the Caribbean 2, Jackass 2, Danika and The Illusionist or they have been really good, just difficult to write about like Brick and Idiocracy. Today though I watched a movie that exceeded my expectations, Running Scared.

While watching the movie I tried to figure out where I had seen the main actor before and I couldn’t put my finger on it until just 5 minutes ago while checking out IMDB. The main star of the movie is Paul Walker, the blond guy from The Fast and The Furious movies. I thought he was pretty lame back then but in Running Scared he was like a different person.

The movie is about Paul Walker trying to get back a gun he had in his possession that was used to kill a cop. The gun keeps changing hands “in an underworld of freaks, pimps, hookers and pedophiles” and Paul spends the whole movie trying to find it while avoiding his gang and the cops.

I liked the way the movie was shot and edited especially the colors and the locations, it was all very dark and urban. There is also a cool signature move where the main character (Paul) visualizes how an incident took place while standing still and looking around, kinda like how they do it in the TV show CSI. The only thing I disliked about the movie was one of the other stars, the kid Cameron Bright. I didn’t like him in The Butterfly Effect and I didn’t like him in Running Scared. The kid just looks really weird.

The movie was really fun to watch and it never felt boring, I actually only checked my email once throughout the whole movie which rarely happens, thats how fast paced it was. Final score though it gets a 4 out of 5. The reason is there were a lot of people I wanted to see more of, mostly his gang and the Russians. But the movie flowed through so many characters and so quickly that it never stopped or slowed down enough to really enjoy them all. In general though this is definitely a movie I would recommend.