Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Kyle Rankin
Starring: Isabel May, Thomas Jane, Radha Mitchell, Eli
Brown, Olly Sholotan, Treat Williams, Barbara Crampton
One of the few silver linings of the COVID crisis is the temporary halt
it's put on America's school shootings. Prior to going into lockdown,
the US seemed to be suffering an epidemic of kids shooting up their
teachers and fellow students in high schools and college campuses across
the nation. The binary response to these events is always the same, with
liberals calling for stricter gun control (but never actually doing
anything about it) and conservatives claiming a few dead kids are a
worthy trade-off for "freedom". Americans never seem willing to delve
further into why this sort of thing happens so regularly in their
country, and anyone who dares to suggest any reasons is scolded. "Too
soon," they're told. Or "Don’t politicise this." But with these mass
shootings occurring on practically a weekly basis, it always seems to be
"too soon" to have an honest debate about the pressures heaped on
teenagers about to enter the most dog-eat-dog society in the Western
world.
School shootings are similarly considered a taboo subject for
filmmakers, and though a few have tackled the subject – Gus Vant's
Elephant; Rene Daalder's Massacre at Central High; Matt Johnson's The Dirties – none have been willing to
really interrogate the subject. They usually pass off the motivations of
their shooters as revenge for being bullied, laying the blame on the
killers' teenage classmates rather than the adult society that tells
American kids that if they don’t get into a top college they face a life
where a trip to the emergency room will financially ruin them.
Writer/director Kyle Rankin's
Run Hide Fight similarly, despicably seeks to shame high
school kids, not for bullying and creating monsters, but for not
standing up and fighting back during school shootings. Essentially a
half-assed Die Hard knockoff set amid a school siege, it's
one of the most morally reprehensible movies I've had the misfortune to
endure for quite some time.
Like the recent Rosamund Pike vehicle
I Care a Lot, Run Hide Fight seems to come with a diploma from the
Megyn Kelly school of feminism, giving us a heroine who is near
impossible to like, but whom the movie seems to think we'll root for in
a way we might not were she a male. Isabel May is admittedly
very, very good in the lead role of Zoe Hull, who with her combat jacket
and gun obsession, seems exactly the sort of kid you might expect to
shoot up a school. When we meet her first, she's out shooting with her
creepy military vet father (Thomas Jane) and bags her first deer,
all before breakfast. Congratulations Zoe, you just killed a large,
docile animal with a high powered piece of technology! If, like me, you
think people who hunt animals are human trash, it's going to be
difficult for you to root for Zoe. Her Dad boasts about how they'll be
able to eat the deer for weeks. Get your food from Walmart, you
douchebags!
Anyway, Zoe, who is surly because her Mom (Radha Mitchell) died
of Cancer, heads to school, where she finds herself in the bathroom when
the movie's villains show up, ramming a van into the school cafeteria.
Led by Tristan (Eli Brown), the shooters are as clichéd a bunch
of antagonists as you'll find in any bad Die Hard clone.
Of course they're Goths, because teenagers who take an interest in
"dark" stuff (unlike those healthy teens who like to murder defenceless
animals) should be viewed with mistrust. Just to make it more
distasteful, it's hinted that Tristan might be bisexual. Tristan is also
portrayed as hyper-intelligent, because if there's one thing Americans
mistrust, it's intelligence.
After initially escaping from the school, Zoe suddenly decides to turn
Rambo and head back inside to take on the shooters. As she takes them
down one by one, she's accompanied by hallucinations of her mother, and
is aided by her Dad, who sets himself up outside the school with a
sniper rifle.
Far from critiquing the ability of kids to get their hands on
sophisticated weaponry, Run Hide Fight pushes the "good
guy with a gun" myth. In one of the more offensive moments, the school's
resident security guard is mocked for being armed only with a baton, and
he soils himself when confronted by his teenage Goth adversaries. But
let's not pretend that so-called "liberal" American action movies don’t
push this same pro-gun message. Just look at the
Purge series, which always comes down to the idiotic
libertarian idea that the public should be armed so as to defend
themselves from their own government.
While I was never going to get on board with the politics of
Run Hide Fight, I'm willing to overlook that aspect if the movie is well made (I'm an
unapologetic fan of John Milius's right wing propaganda movie
Red Dawn). Run Hide Fight is not well made. The set-pieces are
almost non-existent, with Zoe taking down the baddies in the most
forgettable fashion. The main problem is that Rankin never establishes
the geography of the school, so we never know where Zoe is in relation
to her antagonists, erasing any potential for "don’t go around that
corner" moments of tension and suspense. Aside from possibly introducing
us to the next Jennifer Lawrence in May,
Run Hide Fight has nothing to offer anyone on either side
of this moral and political debate.
