Running Scared (2006 film)

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This article is about the 2006 film. For other uses of the same title, see Running Scared
Running Scared
Directed by Wayne Kramer
Written by Wayne Kramer
Starring Paul Walker
Cameron Bright
Vera Farmiga
Chazz Palminteri
Alex Neuberger
Music by Mark Isham
Cinematography Jim Whitaker
Editing by Arthur Coburn
Distributed by New Line Cinema
Release date(s) February 24, 2006
Running time 122 mins.
Language English
Budget $17,000,000
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

Running Scared is a 2006 crime film written and directed by Wayne Kramer and released by New Line Cinema. The film stars Paul Walker, Cameron Bright, Vera Farmiga, Chazz Palminteri and Alex Neuberger. It was released in the United States on February 24, 2006.

The film is rated R by the MPAA for 'pervasive strong brutal violence and language, sexuality and drug content'.

It received mostly negative reviews, with a 39 percent rating (rotten) on RottenTomatoes.com. Despite the negative reviews from critics, it has been more popular with the public. The users section gave it a 75 percent fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.com and 7.6 out of 10 on IMDb.

Contents

[edit] Plot

The movie begins with Joey Gazelle (Paul Walker) driving with a boy, Oleg (Cameron Bright) in a convertible. Oleg has a blood stain on his shirt, implying that he had been shot. The rest of the movie flashes back to the events that led up to this point. Joey, a low-level mafioso, is attending a drug deal with his boss Tommy (Johnny Messner) and associate Sal. The deal goes bad when masked men burst in and try to steal the drugs and money. The stand-off descends into a shoot-out and several of the masked men are killed before the leader flees. Tommy discovers a badge on one of the dead men, revealing that they were dirty cops. As the mobsters flee in a panic, Tommy gives the murder weapons to Joey, telling him to get rid of them.

Rather than dispose of the guns, Joey comes home to his wife Teresa (Vera Farmiga) and son Nicky (Alex Neuberger). He hides the guns in the basement while Nicky and his friend from next door, Oleg, secretly watch. Oleg returns home to his abusive stepfather, Anzor Yugorsky (Karel Roden) and battered mother. Anzor eventually becomes violent and Oleg shoots him with a nickel-plated .38, one of the guns Joey stashed in his basement. Next door, the Gazelle family is disrupted by the gunshots and Joey rushes next door. He finds Anzor wounded but alive, and discovers from him that Oleg has fled with the gun.

Joey must now hunt down Oleg and retrieve the gun before the dirty cops find it or the mafia discover that he lost it. Oleg, in turn, wanders through a sinister urban landscape and encounters a series of often nightmarish characters. He initially runs afoul of a hobo who attempts to use the gun to steal a drug stash. After the hobo is killed, while running around a the corner of a small building, Oleg abruptly runs into a prostitute being abused by a pimp. Pulling out the gun just as the pimp gets ready to put in a final blow, Oleg attempts to distract him by holding him at gunpoint, at the moment unaware that the gun is not loaded. The pimp then threatens him with a knife. The prostitute knocks him out with a pipe and thanks Oleg, turning to walk off just as he has an asthma attack. Feeling pity for the boy, the prostitute takes him to the nearest pharmacy to get him Beclovent (an inhaler), threatening the man behind the counter with the unloaded gun to get it for them. Afterward, the prostitute takes Oleg to a nearby diner to get him a hamburger.

Joey takes Nicky with him to meet his mafia associates at the same diner, but only Nicky notices Oleg. Nicky sneaks away and meets with Oleg in the diner bathroom, where they hide the gun in a toilet. Meanwhile, the mobsters confront Joey on the status of the missing gun. Detective Rydell (Chazz Palminteri), the leader of the dirty cops, has connected the gun that shot the dirty cop with the gun that shot Anzor. Joey assures the mobsters that Rydell is lying, but they are not entirely convinced. As Joey drives away, Nicky admits that he met with Oleg and stashed the gun, but the gun is gone by the time Joey returns to the diner.

Meanwhile, after a painful reunion with Anzor, Oleg escapes the ice cream parlor they are at into the parking lot, sneaking behind parked cars as Anzor storms out after him, ultimately unable to find him. Climbing into the back of a van, Oleg accidentally falls into the clutches of a married couple, Dez (Bruce Altman) and Edele (Elizabeth Mitchell), who take him along with two other kids back to their apartment. After being taken to the large playroom filled with various assortments of toys, and noticing the rather awkward behavior of Dez and Edele, he quickly realizes that the couple are pedophiles. Using an excuse of an upset stomach to go to the bathroom, Oleg at first searches for an unlocked window or some other possible way out of the apartment before noticing Edele's purse by the door. Quickly digging around in it for her cellphone, he sticks beneath the hem of his shorts and beneath his shirt just as Edele notices him. Telling her that he was unable to find the bathroom, although impulsively suspicious, she leads him herself to the bathroom, giving him a small pat atop the head as he enters. Locking the door, Oleg immediately calls up Teresa Gazelle to help him. Telling him to look up in the medicine cabinet for any prescription medication, Oleg grabs one and quickly reads off the address to her, hanging up and stuffing the phone in the toothbrush cup before running over to flush the toilet just as Dez and Edele feverishly burst through the locked door.

Teresa eventually arrives and knocks on the door, Edele instructing Dez to take the kids back to the bedroom before emerging from the playroom in nothing more than a robe and quickly going to answer the door. Telling her that Oleg called her from their apartment, Edele attempts to assure Teresa that she has the incorrect address. Threatening to call and wait for the police to arrive, Edele hesitantly lets her inside. Searching through the entirety of the apartment, including the bedroom where Edele's "two children" lie in bed asleep, bathroom, and finally the playroom, Teresa finds no trace of Oleg; however, just as she walks out the door, she comes to a realization and roughly forces herself back in, pointing out that there was not a single photograph of them or the children in the entire house. Edele panics and makes an excuse that they were just moving in and that everything was still in storage. Rushing back into the playroom, Teresa gets immensely worried just as Dez and Edele appear, Dez threatening to call the police on her. Turning his threat back on them both with child abduction, Teresa pulls out a gun from her purse just as Edele advances on her, yelling at them to tell her where Oleg is. While the couple remains silent, Teresa notices something in the nearby closet and opens it to see an unconscious Oleg fall out, his hands tied and a plastic bag wrapped around his head. Desperately attempting to revive him with CPR, Teresa keeps the two adults at bay with her gun in hand. Oleg eventually revives and Teresa cuts his bindings loose with a surgical instrument, helping him to his feet. Ordering them to move over, Teresa instructs Oleg to get the two other children from the bedroom. In a last ditch attempt, Dez offers Teresa thousands of dollars in cash and diamonds from their safe as long as she just takes Oleg and leaves. Ignoring his offer and keeping her gun pointed at them, Teresa browses the closet behind her, sifting through the costumes until she notices a hangar of plastic body bags, and behind it shelves of several DVD cases with children's names on them, all rated with a 5-star system. Beneath the shelves, a pile of more "surgical instruments", and finally also noticing the plastic covering of the floor. Aghast, Teresa demands Dez's phone and calls the police, giving an address to the apartment building and reports hearing gunshots from across the hall. She hangs up and shoots them both dead.

Joey continues to search for the gun as his mafia associates become violent and the Russian mob gets involved in the affair. All the various criminal factions, along with Oleg and Joey, meet at a hockey rink. The various members trade accusations and alternative theories of the truth as the meeting descends into a shootout. All of the crime lords are killed but not before Joey reveals that he is actually an undercover police officer. Finally, a battered Joey and Oleg emerge. Joey takes Oleg out for some breakfast, but a fellow diner turns out to be the pimp that Oleg had previously encountered. The pimp threatens Oleg with a knife and produces the same gun Joey had previously been trying to locate. In the ensuing struggle Joey kills the pimp by stabbing him in the neck. In a flash, Joey and Oleg are seen fleeing the diner. The movie has reached the opening scene once again. Joey and Oleg drive away, both bloodstained, but after lifting up his shirt to find no wound of any kind, Oleg realizes that it is Joey's blood on both of them, as he had been shot in the struggle. All the while, Oleg's mother has locked herself up in the shed behind their house, grievened and staring down at a picture. Moments later she holds up a lighter right in a cloud of propane gas escaping from a tank she opened, igniting it and ultimately blowing up the shed and part of the house, killing herself in the process. All the while, Joey soon loses the ability to drive and passes out from blood loss.

A policeman's funeral is held for Joey, with Teresa, Nicky, and Oleg mourning. Later, Teresa, Oleg, and Nicky are living in a rural house. Joey steps out from under a car. The funeral had been a cover to protect Joey from mob reprisals. The Gazelle family, with the new addition of Oleg, live happily ever after.

[edit] Cast

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  • Paul Walker as Joey Gazelle: A low-level thug of the Pirello mob family. He is ordered to dispose Tommy's gun after it was used in a bloody shootout that resulted in a death of a police officer; however, Joey never does and the gun is stolen by Oleg, thrusting Joey into a dangerous mission to retrieve the missing gun before either the cops or the Perello mob do.
  • Cameron Bright as Oleg Yugorsky: The son of Anzor and Mila Yugorsky, who are Russian immigrants and neighbors of Joey Gazelle. Oleg steals a gun Joey neglected to dispose and uses it to shoot his father, but only wounds him. He runs away after the shooting, causing Joey to give chase in an effort to retrieve the gun before the police do.
  • Vera Farmiga as Teresa Gazelle: Joey's wife and mother of Nicky. She doesn't want her son exposed to the lifestyle of crime that Joey leads and thus shelters him. She constantly pleads with Joey to not involve their son when he is taken by him on his mission to locate Oleg and retrieve the gun.
  • Chazz Palminteri as Detective Rydell: A corrupt police officer who wants the missing gun in order to bring down the Pirellos, and is willing to do anything to retrieve it. However, his greed causes him to blackmail the Perellos for a large sum of money in return for ignoring the gun altogether. He ultimately is blown up by a cell phone bomb planted by Tommy "Tombs" Perello.
  • Karel Roden as Anzor Yugorsky: Oleg's step-father and a Russian immigrant who now works for the Russian mob in America. He is very abusive, beating his wife and child, and has an addiction to drugs. His cruel and vile behavior causes Oleg to shoot his father, but only wounding him in the process. At the film's climax he is ordered to kill his own son, yet finds himself unable to pull the trigger. Instead, he sacrifices his life for his son, showing that deep within him he does indeed possess a love for his family. Anzor is also obsessed with the actor John Wayne, so much so that he tattoos the man's figure on his back. He even thinks of himself as John Wayne when he is shot to death in the back, similar to how John Wayne died in The Cowboys.
  • Johnny Messner as Tommy "Tombs" Perello: The cruel and sociopathic son of Frankie Pirello (who's regularly elitist and bigoted). He orders Joey to get rid of his gun once it is used to (unknowingly) kill a corrupt cop. When he hears that the gun has possibly gone missing, he begins to suspect Joey may have something to do with its disappearance. Consequently, he keeps a close watch over Joey throughout the film (his temper proves his undoing). He gets brutally shot to death during the climax.
  • Ivana Milicevic as Mila Yugorsky: Oleg's mother. She was a prostitute in Russia and conceived Oleg there. Meanwhile she takes a job to be a prostitute in America in exchange for fifty thousand dollars (to be paid through her earnings.) When the Russian mafia find out she is pregnant, they sent Anzor to kill her. Yet Anzor, the mafia leader's nephew, marries her in order to protect her life. Mila ultimately commits suicide.
  • Alex Neuberger as Nicky Gazelle: Joey and Teresa's son and Oleg's best friend. His parents try to shelter him from the criminal life that Joey leads. However, he is thrust into this corrupt world when he is taken by Joey to help find Oleg.
  • Michael Cudlitz as Sal "Gummy Bear" Franzone: One of the henchmen for the Perellos. He is shot unexpectedly by Tommy when he thinks he is a traitor.
  • Bruce Altman as Dez Hansel: Edele's husband and referred to as "papa bear" by Edele. Both appear to be a kind and loving couple, but they are revealed to be a pair of serial killers who lure children into their apartments to exploit and kill them.
  • Arthur J. Nascarella as Frankie Pirello: The head of the Italian mob and father of Tommy 'Tombs' Pirello. He is ultimately killed by Joey Gazelle when he attempts to shoot Oleg at the film's climax.
  • John Noble as Ivan Yugorsky: The head of the Russian mob. He kills Anzor when he refuses to shoot his own son Oleg, yet he himself is killed by Frankie Pirello when a shootout breaks out between the two mobs.
  • Idalis DeLeon as Divina: The hooker that is first beaten and abused by Lester the pimp, but manages to knock him out while he is threatening Oleg with his knife. She helps Oleg in his plight by getting him medication for his asthma and taking him to a diner to eat.
  • David Warshofsky as Lester the Pimp: The cruel pimp that ultimately ends up with the gun after he buys it from a car mechanic. He shoots Joey Gazelle when he tries to protect Oleg from danger at the film's end. Lester is representative of the "Mad Hatter". [1] He is ultimately killed by Joey who uses a shiv to stab him, but ends up shooting Joey in the process.
  • Jim Tooey as Tony the Hitman: Working for the Pirello Family. He is the person who hands Nicky his food and gets headshot at the end in the ice rink shootout.

[edit] Box office

  • Opening Weekend: $3,381,974 on 1611 screens ($2,099 per a theater average)[2]
  • Domestic Total Gross: $6,855,137[2]
  • Foreign Total Gross: $2,444,539[2]
  • Worldwide Total Gross: $9,299,676 [2]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Wayne Kramer Doesn't Hold Back with "Running Scared" about.com. Excerpt: "...the pimp is the Mad Hatter..."
  2. ^ a b c d Running Scared, Box Office Mojo.

[edit] See also

List of films portraying paedophilia or sexual abuse of minors

[edit] External links

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