 Running Scared should have a good run indeed, if critics' reactions are any indication. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times gives the movie three stars and writes that it "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." Similarly, Roger Moore writes in the Orlando Sentinel: "Something about this way over the top dum-dum bullet of a movie hits. Call its boundary-busting badness a Tarantino parody or a 'message' or, as is most likely, an instant cult film, but you can't say it doesn't hit you like a big-bore slug at close range." But what Ebert and Moore regard as an asset, Deeson Thomson of the Washington Post regards as a definite deficit. "Running Scared never met an over-the-top character, convoluted subplot or gruesome exit wound it didn't love. It's as if writer-director [Wayne] Kramer ... watched Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs repeatedly for 10 days straight, then sat at the word processor and kept typing until he collapsed." Indeed several critics compare the movie with those of Quentin Tarantino, with Kyle Smith in the New York Post observing: "It isn't so much imitation Tarantino as it is imitation imitation Tarantino," while Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer concludes, "Questions of originality notwithstanding, there's plenty of blazing going on here." |
