Mark Goes To The Movies

Running Scared (dir. Wayne Kramer) A street story that's brutal, exploitive, arty, and overlong, it piles on every post-Tarantino cliche (except gratuitous pop culture references) and then some. You got your mafiosi (Italian and Russian), you got your drug dealers, you got your yuppie child pornographers. You have tweakers and crackheads, dirty cops, abused children, hookers (current and ex-) with hearts of gold and evil pimps. You have death by knife, gunshot, C4 explosives, exploding methamphetamine manufacturing chemicals, and (almost) hockey puck. You have Paul Walker as a good bad guy and (yowza!) Vera Farmiga as his ass-kicking protector/avenging-angel wife. You have maybe the most tacky promotional game in the history of Web marketing. You have two surprise almost-endings. In short, two hours of Bad Movie bliss. Mark's rating (stupid points): ????