A single handgun sets off nearly every event in Running Scared, and Wayne Kramer builds the film around that object's path from one set of hands to the next.
What is Running Scared about?
Joey Gazelle, a low-level enforcer for a crime organization, is ordered to make a weapon disappear after it is used against corrupt police officers. Instead of vanishing quietly, the gun slips out of his control and passes through a chain of strangers, each one drawn deeper into danger the longer they hold onto it. Kramer stages the film as a single frantic night, cutting between the people who now have the weapon and the people racing to get it back before it causes more damage. The film leans on its Newark and New Jersey settings and a restless visual style to keep that chase feeling constant rather than episodic.
About the cast
Paul Walker leads as Joey, with Cameron Bright, Vera Farmiga, Chazz Palminteri, Karel Roden, Johnny Messner, Ivana Miličević and Alex Neuberger filling out the ensemble that the gun's journey pulls together over the course of the night.
Context & significance
Running Scared is an international co-production between Germany, the United States and the Czech Republic, filmed with a crime-thriller structure that owes as much to fairy-tale logic as to street crime cinema — critics at the time noted its heightened, almost storybook treatment of a grim premise. Wayne Kramer directed, following an approach that treats the city itself, and the object moving through it, as the film's real subject. The film's mixed critical reception at release has, over time, given way to a following that responds to its stylised energy.
Watching Running Scared on Ktime
This page is free to read without an account. Running Scared streams on K-Time with both Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, and watching it requires logging into a free K-Time account on an interface built for Farsi-speaking audiences.