Mark Reviews Movies: RUN WITH THE HUNTED

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 25, 2020

The first half of Run with the Hunted offers a solid setup, filled with intriguing characters and story concepts that are given an admirable amount of time to develop and breathe. Then, there's the second half.

Writer/director John Swab's movie is a fascinating experience, if only because we watch as a story, divided into two distinct sections, utterly falls apart just when it should be coming together. There's a significant time gap between the two parts, which only accounts for part of the movie's ultimate failure. Years and decades can pass in a story, but as long as the characters and the general thrust of the story remain recognizable and consistent, the leap forward doesn't matter.

Swab, though, is more concerned with wrapping things up as tidily as possible. In the process, he loses the attention to detail that defines the movie's first half. The second half of the screenplay is in such a rush to resolve things that it seemingly forgets to tell the rest of the story.

In the beginning, there's a boy named Oscar (Mitchell Paulsen), whose father (played by William Forsythe in a two-scene cameo) tells his son that the mark of a good man is to know when to act for the betterment of others. In that regard, there's a neighboring family of a single father and two kids. Loux (Madilyn Kellam) is young Oscar's best friend, and she and her brother Amos (Evan Assante) have been abused for some time by their alcoholic father (played by Brad Carter).

Loux tells Oscar how that abuse has become sexual, so one night, the boy sneaks into his neighbors' house and kills the abuser with a fire poker (The actual killing is shown later in a nightmare, which is a smart decision in theory but, because the characters are presented with such short shrift in the latter half, doesn't offer much of an impact beyond the violence of the scene). Stowing away on a milk truck, Oscar flees his small Oklahoma town for the city of Tulsa.

Quickly, he's picked up by the cops and, upon his release, meets Peaches (Kylie Rogers), a fellow runaway who is part of a Dickens-like gang of child thieves and pickpockets. The crew is run by Sway (Mark Boone Junior), who protects Oscar despite the trouble his status as a kid wanted for murder might bring, and the whole operation is overseen by Birdie (Ron Perlman), a powerful and feared man.

This part of the story establishes a lot, but there's a decided focus on the characters, who might seem like broad archetypes in certain regards but hint at hidden richness. Take Sway, for example, who could simply be cruel and manipulative. Instead, though, we get a sense that he genuinely cares for the kids in his gang, as in how he convinces Birdie and a crooked cop—the one who released Oscar, allowing Peaches the opportunity to enlist him—named Flannery (Slaine) to spare the boy from a deadly but, for the enterprise, pragmatic fate. Even the character's final moment is an act of consolation for one of his wards.

There's a similar care in the relationship between Oscar and Peaches. She latches on to the boy with the bittersweet affection of a kid who wants someone to love her, and there's something both mournful and sweet about the connection between the two.

Somehow, all of this promise and potential is wasted with a 15-year jump. Oscar, now played by Michael Carmen Pitt (who looks and is too old for the role, which is even more jarring since all of the adult characters look exactly the same), has his own gang of child thieves and pickpockets.

He's still with Peaches, now played by Dree Hemingway. Birdie is suspicious of both of them for unexplained reasons, revealing that it's an excuse for conflict. Meanwhile, older Loux (Sam Quartin), getting a secretarial job with a private investigator (played by Isiah Whitlock Jr.), and Amos (Gore Abrams) are searching for their old friend in the city. To explain how this plot and these new subplots are resolved would be pointless—because most of it predictable—and tough—because Swab's screenplay takes so many shortcuts that any sense of character motivation disappears.

These halves are connected, obviously, by the characters and certain details, but that hardly matters. There's an equally obvious disconnect in Swab's approach to each half of Run with the Hunted. One shows he cares. The other has abundant evidence to suggest he doesn't.

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