The Long Take: Run, Hide, Fight in that Order

A belated review of a movie I once had a tangential relationship with.

When The Daily Wire released Run Hide Fight, it was turfed to be the most controversial film released that year. Written and directed by Kyle Rankin, Run Hide Fight was initially going to be a launchpad for Cinestate’s defunct sub-production label Rebeller. There was a puff piece in The Ringer about it, when the website Rebeller Media was launched. As I previously wrote in Splice Today, I contributed to a lot of articles there, which was an action fanzine of sorts for the subsidiary. Then a controversy surrounding one of its producers alleged to have sexually assaulted people onset and the whole brand folded. The fact that a movie is about a mass shooting, which happened to be the launchpad for The Daily Wire as the entertainment industry’s conservative competitor, is too simplistic to say why it causes substantive conniptions among its enemies.

Because of this, I avoided watching the film upon its release. As I have read some of the reviews, I already suspected that they were nasty and unfair, because of the politics it doesn’t line up to. It was a hit among the Wire’s subscriber base. Having seen it now, my suspicions have been confirmed. While one would argue that the prevalence of guns and a need for greater self-defense is an affirmation of conservatism, the movie vaguely expresses such a pressing thought. It’s a young girl’s journey to push through a tragedy by applying her previous experiences. 

Like most of Cinestate oeuvre, it has traits that made the studio unique. The characters usually put themselves in urgent situations and have enough moral baggage in their lives that they’re better off not being in there. The colors are dim, and there is a lot of space used in its compositions. It is also uncompromising in its violence and challenges the viewer in being among the depths of its flawed heroes. This divides critics, but overall, it accomplishes a niche interested in being challenged by its ugliness.

Run Hide Fight borrows from the Die Hard template, in which an ordinary rural girl named Zoe Hull is caught in the midst of a school siege by teenage terrorists. Except for her hunting acumen, she doesn’t have a lot of defense mechanisms. Her mother (Radha Mitchell) died from cancer. During moments of tension, her spirit appears to motivate her in fighting back. The words from each title showcase Zoe’s arc.  It runs from such an interesting concept. After all, in a country where its gun culture is uniquely strong, with inevitable mass shootings appearing here and there, self-defense during a mass shooting is not an idea that’s inherently partisan. People love to see someone, anyone, whether or not they are armed, hit back, survive, and saving as many lives as possible during a tense moment. A typical school shooting precisely follows the predications of the Milgram Experiment. That to its detriment, Run Hide Fight removes any sense of realism. But out of all the issues I have with the film, it’s the least pressing.

The issue begins with Rankin’s screenplay, where the dialogue is often cluttered. It made all the characters far less interesting. Except for one scene featuring a balloon combusted in a science lab. There is also little establishment on why we care about these characters or the school, to set up the tension for a mass shooting. Whether it’s Zoe’s best friend, who wants to ask her out for the prom, the obese but popular girl, they are all cut out from an after-school special. The school also doesn’t have an identity, but neither are the shooters. In fact, we don’t know the motivations of the ring-leader or why he would hold up a cafeteria. Does he want to be Insta-famous in the most morbid way possible, hence live streaming the whole thing on Instagram and Facebook, a la the Christchurch massacre? Did the teachers abuse him? Was he a psychopath to his mother? Instead, the actor that plays him spouts confusing blocks of dialogue that references Internet lingo and comment sections, that no one, apart from Daily Wire subscribers, would be familiar with. 

Zoe is also a bit dull. Unlike Brett Ridgeman or Bradley Thomas, she exudes innocence, so that there isn’t anything to push back against them. Radha Mitchell’s moments are all misplaced, only because the choice of putting her in quasi-flashbacks never gets past a thick air of corniness.

Cinestate’s films have been accused of possessing a cultural point that many think is wrong, and as I mentioned earlier, this is often in bad faith. But there is a sequence that could prove their assumption as valid. In it, which Zoe successfully captures one of the minions and during an exchange, the kid claims that he was bullied, hence why he got involved with planting bombs on school grounds. Films like Promising Young Woman and Knives Out are a victim of making a valid point on behalf of its hero - that being bullied is no excuse to shoot up a school - that gets ahead of any character development. It becomes patronizing as a result, rather than a moment of clarity. 

On a technical level, the film is consumer-grade. The sound mixing gets muddled, whenever bullets are fired, while its unattractive color palette makes it tapioca by nature. But there are sequences that are actually inspired in choreography, much of it comes from Zoe going against the shooters. Overall, the film remains intense, and the film doesn’t just rely on its premise alone. But the aesthetics are so bare bone, it doesn’t have any distinguishing traits, even from the garish MAGA-friendly maximalism of Dinesh D’Souza.

Anyone who has seen Elephant, We Need to Talk About Kevin, or Uwe Boll’s film Heart of America is aware that school shootings don’t demand a cinematic fantasy. It’s usually traumatic for many victims involved, and a heated political debate about gun rights and control comes in the aftermath. But there’s a place for that transgression because tragedy should not be exclusive to dour miserablism. By that measure, Quentin Tarantino shouldn’t be covering the horrors of Nazism, slavery, or serial killing hippies in a lighter and more genre-focused manner. The difference between Tarantino and Kyle Rankin, however, is that the former is more skilled in filmmaking and that itself, justify any angles he sought for. 

So the problem with Run Hide Fight is (for a lack of a better word) execution. To understand where the movie came from, you don’t have to dive into the canon of Ben Shapiro videos, or the readings of Charles Bramesco crying fowl of its existence. Instead, it owes so much to cinema’s contemporary history, that it wears an influence as a badge, rather than its sleeves. Morally indefensible, it is absolutely not.  And even if I’ve written for the blog that serves as an upcoming preview of its movie, it’s not even Cleaver. Yet neither does it achieves much as a piece of work.