Run hit blu-ray and DVD on January 14th from Millennium Entertainment
Pro tip: When making a parkour movie, go ahead and make sure you’ve got a lot of parkour in it.
Run is an urban dance film ala Step Up 2 The Streets, only with some guns, parkour, dubstep, and Eric Roberts. Also it stars Narnia’s own Peter Pevensie (William Moseley), who apparently also starred in that YouTube video where Don Cheadle played Captain Planet. Here in Run, Moseley plays American teenager and parkour-jewel thief on the run Daniel Lombardi. He moonlights as a cat burglar because he lives a life on the lamb with his father, Near Dark and Heroes’ Adrian Pasdar, who pissed off the wrong mob boss by dating his sister and conceiving young Daniel. So, much like River Phoenix in Sidney Lumet’s [vastly superior, and heavily ripped off] Running On Empty, Daniel and his dad need to live by a strict code, making no connections and ties as they bounce around to stay a step ahead of a vengeful Eric Roberts. (Hey, you’d do the same thing if Eric Roberts was after you).
I’m a sucker for parkour. I dragged a bunch of friends to see District B-13 in theaters when that hit the States, and smiled the whole way through. I leapt at the chance to point out occurrences of parkour to the uninitiated in big screen movies like Casino Royale and Die Hard 4. So what with all the parkour and Eric Roberts and Adrian Pasdar showing up, I bit on the opportunity to review this wild card of a film upon its blu-ray release. And I’m not going to be TOO mean to Run, but it certainly isn’t what one would conventionally call “good”.
As I mentioned… scene after scene will unfold before your eyes (after the opening dub-steppy-parkour montage) in which zero parkour happens. There’s high school drama, a girl (who is super tough, but will still totally end up needing to be rescued) and some new friends who will test the “rules” Daniel and his father have established. Oh, and for some reason Adrian Pasdar decides at the beginning of the movie that the time has finally come to move back to New York City and confront the crime bosses they’ve been running from. Inevitably the teen angst and the terrible idea to just basically try to apologize to a mob lord will lead to a violent, parkour-filled finale. But not TOO parkour-filled. Come to think of it, while parkour is incredibly visually thrilling, and seems to be a sport/martial art that was born for the big screen… it isn’t really practical at all, and may not integrate into a narrative all that easily.
This theory is certainly bolstered by the existence of Run, a movie that fails to integrate its “Running On Empty-Lite” storyline with its only real hook of on screen free-running. The only question that remains then, is, despite Run being terrible, is it entertaining? Oh very much so. Actually the moment I realized that this was essentially an urban dance movie, I got into that head space and laughed my way through the flat performances and painfully obvious stunt doubles.
Paper-thin plotting, laughable performances, and a “gee-whiz” team of teenage parkour fanatics riddle the run-time of this film. The action is dull, the target audience is pre-teen, and the dubstep sounds exactly like dubstep. I can’t recommend a purchase of Run, or probably even a rental. But to those Step Up fans out there who feel like they’ve already seen it all; or to those Breakin’ fans who have always wondered what the comparable aughts-equivalent would be to their beloved, community-centered dance films; yeah, you may want to Redbox Run and have some wine with this cheese.
The Package
The movie appears to have been partially crowd-funded and the end credits feature a bunch of home videos of real-life (donors’?) parkour routines which are more thrilling than anything found in the body of this movie. Writer/Director Simone Bartesaghi most likely knew what she was doing with the teen-friendly tone of this whole project, and if it finds an audience at all, it’ll be among the tweens of 2014. But the movie doesn’t look particularly visually resplendent. The disc offers a 3-D viewing experience, which could be potentially cool, but I don’t have 3-D capacity at home. There’s one behind the scenes featurette which I literally can’t remember at all, after just about a week since watching it. This movie is the definition of a RedBox movie, and hopefully there it’ll find its audience. Me? I’ll take Electric Boogaloo and District B-13 and leave Run to the tween dubstep fiends it was created for.
And I’m Out.