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RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL (2019)
Director: Jason Cabell Cast: Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne, Leslie Bibb, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Clifton Collins Jr., Cole Hauser MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:40 Release Date: 9/20/19 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 19, 2019 In Running with the Devil, writer/director Jason Cabell follows a shipment of cocaine from a farm in Colombia, through Mexico, up the West Coast of the United States, and into Vancouver. There are human beings involved in the process, of course, but they're definitely not the point of focus for Cabell. It would be a stretch to call them characters. Cabell doesn't even bother to give them names. There is something inherently fascinating about the process of the trip, though. The package, a large backpack filled with bricks of cocaine, repeatedly changes hands as it's transported by foot, by truck, by boat, by plane, and by foot again, across various terrains and encountering assorted threats—criminals, police, petty thieves—along the way. Cabell keeps score, too. With every new stop, the price per kilogram increases, and the folks who deal with the cocaine at each of those stops clearly profit from the inflation. The poor farmer and his wife sleep in the same bedroom as their children, while the guys overseeing the delivery live in spacious mansions. One of those guys is the Cook (Nicolas Cage), whose boss "the Boss" (Barry Pepper) orders him to follow this latest delivery from Bogota to the Boss' home base in Vancouver. The shipments have been coming in short as of late, and the Boss, sending the Executioner (Cole Hauser) along for the trek, wants the Cook to uncover the reason why. Meanwhile, a man called "the Man" (Laurence Fishburne, turning the scenery to cud) has come up with a deadly concoction made from the cocaine, and the DEA Agent in Charge (Leslie Bibb) has a personal motivation to stop the whole enterprise. She is almost as ruthless as the drug dealers in her tactics. The concept of the narrative is admirable, in that it's entirely procedural. Person by person and step by step, Cabell tracks the often simple and sometimes elaborate ways that the cocaine gets from Point A to Point B. The only constant is that everyone on the route is expendable. That's how the filmmaker sees his characters, too, though. They exist in Running with the Devil to help the package along and to talk almost exclusively about it. These people are hollow shells, and without any personality coming from them, the movie itself is just a dry, ultimately monotonous travelogue of crime and misery. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for violence and disturbing images, drug use, strong sexual content,
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