A retired Navy SEAL who for a time was a military advisor on the Colombian drug trade, Jason Cabell conceived his first solo feature as writer-director to tell the story of that particular commerce…
Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Leslie Bibb, Clifton Collins Jr., Peter Facinelli, Christian Tappan, Natalia Reyes, Cole Hauser, JT Holmes, Marie Wagenman, Tait Fletcher, Damacio Page, Luce Rains, Ellen Humphries, Sarah Minnich, Keith Jardine, Xavier Declie.
After an ominous prologue that we’ll eventually get back to involving the grim fate of a bound, naked man, Cabell’s script begins to introduce his raft of characters some weeks earlier. A little girl who tells her Seattle school bus driver “I can’t wake them up” is deposited into the care of an aunt, her parents having fatally OD’d during the night. That aunt is a federal agent for whom the war on drugs just got very personal.
Becoming almost a giant exquisite-corpse story, “Running” nonetheless keeps its cool no matter how arbitrarily extreme the plot twists. There’s a lot of abrupt, intense violence here, yet these drastic reversals of fortune aren’t dwelt on, underlining the fact that such life-taking means very little to those involved —particularly to characters referred to as the Boss or the Executioner .
Handing himself an ambitious script with numerous logistical and tonal challenges, Cabell handles things with considerable panache, delivering a colorful package that nonetheless works hard to avoid being showy or sensational. His cast is admirably poker-faced and droll for the most part, including the more typically gonzo Cage in wry, world-weary mode, and Fishburne in the kind of slave-to-hedonistic-excess role that would normally go to his co-star.
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