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100It's a pumped-up, intricate and fast-moving yarn that never flags and continues to play out in unexpected ways as it unravels.
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83Paul "Surfer Boy" Walker turns in a very credible action performance if you give him a Jersey accent, cover him in grime and beat the ever-loving tar out of him for two hours.
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75Goes so far over the top, it circumnavigates the top and doubles back on itself; it's the Mobius Strip of over-the-topness. I am in awe. It throws in everything but the kitchen sink. Then it throws in the kitchen sink, too, and the combo washer-dryer in the laundry room, while the hero and his wife are having sex on top of it.
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75Running Scared is a vicious and brutal B-movie jacked up to hysterical, hallucinatory proportions -- a pulpy, violent action picture that torments the viewer as much as its characters, and I mean that as a compliment.
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75If Running Scared had come out in 1994, before "Pulp Fiction," it - and Kramer - would be hailed as blazingly original. But questions of originality notwithstanding, there's plenty of blazing going on here.
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75It's 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.
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75If you like kinetic movies about crime, criminals, and all sorts of bad behavior, Running Scared will catch and hold your attention.
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70An overly ambitious guilty pleasure with enough action and violence to keep you interested, it just doesn't have much else.
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63Ultimately, it is a serviceable, well-made thriller that earns its R rating.
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60There also are hints of Doug Liman and Tony Scott to be found in this hopped-up, bullet-riddled crime thriller, but while certain sequences pack an admitted visceral kick, the prevailing effect is one of utter overkill.
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50Running Scared's relationship to "The Cooler" is roughly that of industrial metal to a quaint torch song.
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50Even a talented lead couldn't save Mr. 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.
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50There's no denying that viewers not prepared for the relentless stream of nasty personalities, profane invective and bone-crunching violence are in for a very long sit.
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50Not surprisingly, everything feels begged, borrowed and stolen from other better movies, from Quentin Tarantino's exclamation-point violence to the slo-mo bullet trajectory shots from "The Matrix."
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50The ugliness on display in Running Scared has neither "Sin City's" context nor its wit, and it offers little more than stylish excess for its own sake, with no clear aspirations other than to twist people's arms until they yelp "Uncle."
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40Running Scared is decently acted and divertingly brutal, but it's also a giant step backward for its maker.
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Writer-director Wayne Kramer (The Cooler) is about as skilled at storytelling as Walker is at acting, which is to say not very.
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38The whole movie is some kind of joke, a sick one to be savored by a certain segment of the movie audience. You know who you are.
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Running Scared has some camp value as the kind of midnight movie you can laugh at (not with), but it isn't so much imitation Tarantino as it is imitation imitation Tarantino.
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38A potential howler done in by a tendency to wear too much body tissue on its sleeve.
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33Running is a fevered smashup, as if Hollywood dug up Sam Peckinpah's corpse and forced it to adapt "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" for the screen.
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30A vicious, incoherent shoot-'em-up.
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25I have a sneaking suspicion that Running Scared could become a cult classic.
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25A depressing piece of gun-crazy Hollywood scuzz that, with its gassy style and runaway immorality, makes a Tony Scott movie look like a Robert Bresson picture.
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25When promising independent filmmakers decide to jump on the bandwagon and pump up the gore, the results are sure to be touted as visceral and unflinching. Don't be fooled. Kramer has even commented that the movie should be viewed as a modern-day Grimm's fairy tale. It's grim all right.
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25Writer/director Wayne Kramer's approach to storytelling is to withhold any information that might give away the plot.
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25The result is an out-of-control, lost-in-the-funhouse experience.
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20It's not just a bad movie it actually manages to suck the very hope out of the air, leaving behind a cinematic vacuum populated by mobsters, sadists, pedophiliac demon-people, and an overwhelming sense of futility that just makes you want to run in the other direction.
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20It'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.
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0Running 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.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 26 out of 35
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Mixed: 0 out of 35
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Negative: 9 out of 35
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1This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
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lol.pwn?9Great movie, I would have given it a ten but some of the violence seemed out of place and uneccessary near the end .
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