A silly, schlocky and stupefyingly ill-judged take on school shootings
Venice Film Festival Run Hide Fight Cert TBC, 109 min ★★★★★
Dir Kyle Rankin
Starring Isabel May, Thomas Jane, Radha Mitchell, Eli Brown, Olly Sholotan, Treat Williams, Cyrus Arnold, Catherine Davis, Britton Sear
By Robbie Collin
Zoe Hull is the kind of character you can imagine Jennifer Lawrence having a shot at 10 years ago, though perhaps we should all be very glad that she didn’t. Played by Isabel May, she is the steely teenage heroine of Run Hide Fight, a stupefyingly ill-judged high school shooting thriller that premiered at the Venice Film Festival last night.
The problem with Kyle Rankin’s film isn’t that it treats its incendiary subject matter as popcorn fodder per se. It’s that, either by accident or design, it is in thrall to one extremely well-known modern multiplex classic in particular, which is Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, to the point that it often feels like an insanely poor-taste experiment.
Where to begin? Tristan Voy (Eli Brown), the ringleader of the four shooters, is essentially Heath Ledger’s
Joker: Senior Year, down to the tangled, floppy hair, peacocking speeches, creepy-flamboyant intonation, and unsettling habit of fiddling with knives. The first step of his plan bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Ledger’s villain, too: a van, as opposed to a bus, bursts through the wall of the school dining hall, delivering a near-identical shock-and-awe entrance. The complex plan that then unfolds involves a network of pre-planted bombs that bamboozles law enforcement, and also a villain using a simple disguise to circulate unnoticed in public. Then of course there’s the protagonist: a capable vigilante working in an uneasy alliance with the cops. Here, though, we do alight on a crucial difference, which is that Batman wasn’t invited to the school prom by his best friend in the opening 15 minutes.
Said best friend is Olly Sholotan’s Lewis, a yearbook nerd who is recruited against his will by Tristan to live-stream the coming massacre on social media. (With scant regard for plausibility, this footage is soon going out live and unedited on the national news.) Meanwhile, as Tristan showboats for Lewis’s iphone, a trio of minions round up the pupils.
The film makes no attempt to grapple with the American school shooting as a nihilistic cultural phenomenon. Instead, the objective is schlock with poise – so once Zoe gives the killers the slip, she embarks on a death-or-glory rescue mission, evacuating classmates through windows while hunting down Tristan’s followers one by one. On hand to offer moral support is the ghost of her mother (Radha Mitchell), who died of cancer a while back but still pops up when a word of parental encouragement is needed. And when parental covering fire would be handier – well, that’s a job for dad Todd (Thomas Jane), a bearlike exmilitary type who can infiltrate a crime scene by hanging on to the bottom of a police van.
In light of all of the above, May’s performance feels as heroic as the character she’s playing. The 19-year-old actress is, without question, a young woman whose future looks bright. The immediate present, though? Eek.
UK release date TBC