Night of the Running Man (1995)

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Masterful Movie

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

There's so many defects and so many qualities about "Night of the Running Man" that in the end all we get is a bad film that is quite good and a good film that is ridiculously bad. The idea is almost an encounter between "Collateral" and "No Country for Old Men" but without the same dynamism and quality of both films. Dialogs are poorly written and very very simplistic to the point of annoyance, and the situations are predictable, implausible and incredibly unrealistic. It's a very silly movie!Poor Andrew McCarthy suffers hell after finding a suitcase full of money in his cab, left by one of his unusual passengers. It looks like the mob is trying to get back the money and they hired a dangerous hit-man (Scott Glenn) to find it. On one side there's Andrew running away from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City and then Los Angeles, and on the other side, Glenn's tactics to find this dumb guy, who seems to be getting really smart after this sudden lucky strike. The most obvious clichés of the world are used here again and again.However, the great surprise of this movie are the villains and their methods of doing their job. Glenn is very effective as the scary guy who kills everybody on his way, the kind of guy who doesn't trust anybody. He's very terrifying. And there's another villain, played by John Glover, who is very scary and because of his torture methods that the film gets interesting (when he puts McCarthy's feet on boiling water to prevent him from running away). That scene alone worths the whole film.But this movie cannot escape of its negative aspects. Fight scenes are badly executed; lots of laughable parts; the amazing fact of a guy who had his feet burned walking on crutches one day later after the incident (at least put him on a wheelchair when walking out of the hospital, then I would believe just a little); the presentation of both major characters are terrible, you don't even have time to relate or care for the hero, he's simply thrown on the screen and we "have" to like him. Uninteresting as an action film or as a thriller, and a little bit funny as a drama, "Night of the Running Man" is good in making us wondering why good actors allow themselves to waste their talents in such a simplistic and dull project where their skills aren't well used. It's not a complete waste of time but when you think of the possibilities of doing better things on a boring day, you won't even feel guilty of missing this, even if you admire the people involved in this. 5/10

"Night of the Running Man" opens with a real "grabber" of an opening, as likable cab driver (Andrew McCarthy) unintentionally gets involved with a fare who has a bag of money stolen from the mob. When the bag guy is killed, McCarthy decides to run with the bag. Enter Scott Glenn as an arrogant "fixer', who is sent by the head boss (Wayne Newton) to retrieve the million dollars and eliminate the cab driver. Glenn is excellent as the somewhat paranoid, darkly sadistic, methodical hunter. Along the way, John Glover becomes a colorful accomplice of Glenn's. This film has excellent character development, a compelling story, a sympathetic hero, and is unpredictable. Highly recommended. - MERK

Erstwhile 80's Brat Pack thesp Andrew McCarthy is unexpectedly strong and engaging as a sweet, luckless Las Vegas cab driver who inadvertently takes possession of a million dollars worth of mob money and promptly hotfoots it out of town. Scott Glenn delivers a nastily dead-on turn as the cocksure, steely, unflappable underground hit-man troubleshooter assigned by a Sin City Mafia don (Wayne Newton, the King of the Strip himself, in a surprisingly convincing cameo) to retrieve the stolen loot (don't miss the truly super scene where Glenn slices up a would-be mugger's eyes and gleefully snarls to the whining, freshly blinded man, "Get a dog!"). Greatly enlivened by B-movie action maestro Mark ("Truck Stop Women," "Commando") Lester's briskly smooth, straightforward direction, further enhanced by a splendidly scuzzy appearance by the ever-slimy John Glover as Glenn's equally detestable and overconfident Los Angeles partner in crime, a genuinely beguiling performance by the cute, perky Janet Gunn as the kind, cuddly nurse who comes to the battered, beleaguered McCarthy's aid, a few fun, clever plot twists, a welcome and refreshing sense of neatly realized inner logic and rationality (yes, this flick is actually very smart and doesn't actively insult the viewer's intelligence), an appropriately hard and gritty no-nonsense tone, a nonstop snappy pace, some good old fashioned (pretty graphic) sex and violence, and authentically tacky Las Vegas and Los Angeles locations, this rip-snorting little corker really makes the grade as a tense, tasty, and, most importantly, quite trashy chase action thriller.

This is one of those movies where the star is the good guy even though he leaves the scene of a deadly accident, steals a million dollars, is too stupid to effect a proper get away, kills a person and ends up torching his own car with two dead bodies in it and no one behind the steering wheel. The best parts were those of the killer and his friend (also a killer). I wonder about a woman who gets slugged full force directly in the face by one of these killers and doesn't get so much as a bruise. Well, she ends up running off with the star so I guess the slug job wasn't totally ineffective. I don't think there was one piece of this film that wasn't gratuitous to some extent, gratuitous inhumanity, gratuitous violence, gratuitous stupidity, gratuitous torture so I gave it a gratuitous four.