Running Scared (2006) Critic Reviews

A 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.Read the full review

Goes 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.Read the full review

Running 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.Read the full review

Running 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.Read the full review

If you like kinetic movies about crime, criminals, and all sorts of bad behavior, Running Scared will catch and hold your attention.Read the full review

It's a pumped-up, intricate and fast-moving yarn that never flags and continues to play out in unexpected ways as it unravels.Read the full review

There 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.Read the full review

Even 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.Read the full review

The 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."Read the full review