I’d have to say it was around the time Mike and Carol Brady rescued frightened young Oleg from his world of pimps, crack-whores, violent hobos, crooked cops, and bad mobster clichés, and brought him into their cozy, little nook of child-porn, pedophilia, and murder that I realized I’d been blessed with reviewing 2006’s first truly, trashy film. But more on the Brady-philes later.

Running Scared is writer-director Wayne Kramer’s follow-up to his mildly successful debut, The Cooler. That film succeeded in its central romance–two middle-aged losers struggling against the malady of life, finding hope in a shared despair. It failed in all the smoke and mirrors thrown in to distract us from the raw beauty of this desolate affair–red herrings, plot twists, and an overabundance of two-dimensional thugs acting like two-dimensional thugs.

Apparently Kramer is still disoriented by smoke and mirrors, and chose to construct Running Scared entirely out of superficial distractions, which, given the right approach, doesn’t necessarily result in a terrible film, but in Kramer’s case it does. Too bad Hollywood has successfully served us plenty such films (see Face-Off) that encourage you to check a discerning mind at the door and enjoy the ride. Instead, Kramer takes a sloppy foray into the dark side, diverting all his energies on a superfluous campaign of "shock and awe" (think Training Day stripped of all pathos and intensity).

We’re left with 120 minutes of heavy-handed bleakness, gratuitous violence, and melodramatic plot twists surrounding a violent, high-strung protagonist (Paul Walker) who’s impossible to sympathize, let alone identify, with. This is tagged by a two-minute, cop-out ending that only succeeds in confirming the film has absolutely nothing to say–a result that completely diminishes any acclaim Kramer received for The Cooler.

Oh, right, the synopsis. Well, there’s a gun, and Joey (Walker), a low-level mobster, is charged with disposing of it. He doesn’t. It gets in the hands of his 10-year-old neighbour Oleg (Cameron Brice–a redeeming element), who shoots his dad and runs off with it. Enter a continuous string of ruthless assholes as Joey attempts to track down Oleg to save his own ass.

Which brings us back to the Brady-philes. What does it say about a filmmaker when the only engaging sequence on seven reels of celluloid is a gratuitous scene involving a white middle-class couple’s foray into the raping, filming and killing of children?

Just one thing: Wayne Kramer is dead to me.