Film hits with excessive violence

Actor Paul Walker holds his own in his best role.
By ROGER MOORE
THE ORLANDO SENTINEL
"Running Scared" isn't a movie you watch. You endure it, like a brutal beat-down.
It's an opera of excess, an orgy of blood, bullets, abuse and really, really bad language. It's the director of "The Cooler" trying to out-Tony Tony Scott, purveyor of "True Romance" and "Domino."
Couldn't stand "True Romance." Couldn't bear "Domino."
But 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.
Paul Walker is Joey Gazelle, a low-level Jersey mob functionary whose job is disposing of guns used in crimes. Only he doesn't. He stashes them as "insurance," he tells his thonged mob moll of a wife (Vera Farmiga, very good).
Neighborhood
But his lousy neighborhood means he has lowlife neighbors, such as an abusive, meth-making Russian scumbag named Anzor (Karel Roden). Anzor's stepson spies Joey hiding a gun and swipes it. And darned if he doesn't shoot the old man in the middle of an epic, stoned "Vy can't John Wayne not get kilt in 'The Cowboys' dis time?" rant.
Bad news. That gun was used in a bloody shootout with dirty cops in the film's opening scene.
You don't want your own mob figuring out you have weapons that can tie them to crimes. You don't want the Russian mob all over you, either.
You don't want crooked cop Chazz Palminteri coming down on you.
"I got the toughest mob in the world. I'm the law."
And you don't want little asthmatic Oleg, played by Cameron Bright ("Birth"), the creepiest kid in the movies, trotting around Jersey, pulling that gun and dispensing rough Mighty Mouse justice on anybody who crosses his tracks.
"Here I come to save the day!"
Kramer turns one long night, played in whiplash flashback, into a nightmarish descent into Hell, N.J.
Oleg crosses paths with murderous crackheads, brutal pimps, gangsters, cops and a married couple who top them all.
Jerry sprints from one dead end to the next, maniacally hunting down the evidence that would end him, his family and his family's family, often bringing his own 10-year-old along for the ride.
"You just killed me," he screams at the kid, after one bad lead too many.
Performances
Walker takes what is certainly his best role by the teeth and holds his own with every movie wiseguy under the Jersey sun. But Farmiga, a veteran of TV and bit movie parts, chews it up and delivers the movie's best and funniest lines.
"Joey," she tells her mobster husband, "I have never seen evil before tonight. I did not marry an evil man. Shady, maybe. Sleazy, sure ..."
Yeah well, "in sickness and in health," yadda yadda. If you're not laughing with this, you're laughing at it. In between gasps.
The mobsters are stereotypes, something veteran baddie Palminteri acknowledges when he calls them "goombahs." The action is so frenetically shot that you're thrown right into the middle of the mayhem -- confused, frightened, shocked at what you've just seen, looking to wipe the blood off your popcorn.
It's borderline irresponsible, a virtual horror movie of a gangster thriller.
It's incredibly violent, but therein lies some of the message of "Running Scared." This is what it takes to jolt us these days. This is what can happen with just one loose gun bouncing down the wrong streets.
And this is what happens when you channel Quentin Tarantino, and you sleep in Tony Scott's bed. Somebody's gonna need to change the sheets.