Run Hide Fight: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The movie could have been much worse. It may appeal to adolescents and those with adolescent tastes in movies, but for everyone else it isn’t worth seeing.

Run Hide Fight, written and directed by Kyle Rankin, is a new action thriller film that tells the story of Zoe Hull, a female high school student fighting back during a school shooting.

The movie, which stars Isabel May as Zoe and Thomas Jane as her father Todd, is basically Die Hard but set in a high school with a female protagonist.

Run Hide Fight has garnered some media attention due to its being the first film distributed by The Daily Wire, the conservative media outlet founded in 2015 by political commentator Ben Shapiro. The movie is available for streaming exclusively on The Daily Wire for paid subscribers beginning on Friday January 15th.

As Andrew Brietbart once said, “politics is downstream of culture” and with this in mind Shapiro is leading the charge for conservatives to make a more concerted effort to be involved in popular culture, long a bastion of liberal domination.

Conservatives have for decades railed against liberals’ control of entertainment, decrying the impact it has in shaping public sentiment. But despite all the handwringing, conservatives have never really made a serious move to compete in that arena, just complain about it.

Conservative filmmakers have traditionally lacked the talent, skill and craft to make worthwhile conservative art or entertainment, which is usually so politically heavy-handed, artistically obtuse, intellectually trite and emotionally infantile as to be ridiculously unwatchable.

Run Hide Fight sets out to reverse that trend.

As someone more arthouse than action movie, more cinema than politics and who has zero interest in Ben Shapiro, his whiny politics and his even whinier voice, my expectations going into Run Hide Fight were very low, and my assessment is as follows.

The film is most definitely derivative, formulaic and predictable as it borrows liberally from the Die Hard blueprint. The structure of the narrative and the character archetypes are almost identical to Die Hard…but not as good.

For example, one-dimensional bad guy Tristan Voy and his henchmen are pale imitations of Die Hard’s deliciously devious villain Hans Gruber and his collection of monstrous minions.

The film also suffers from some sloppy directing and flimsy storytelling as director Kyle Rankin is no master craftsman like the criminally under valued John McTiernan.

Rankin’s decision to juxtapose the realistic and viscerally unnerving school shooting violence with the action hero fantasy violence of Zoe’s John McClain-esque counter-attack is definitely tonally jarring, disorienting and off-putting.

But there are also some bright spots.

The well paced film runs an hour and forty-nine minutes and kept me engaged the whole time.

The film’s politics are pretty subtle, with conservative values just a back drop, not the main attraction.

And finally, Isabel May does a terrific job in carrying the whole movie. May is not Bruce Willis, but she is a formidable force and flashes moments of genuine brilliance in the movie.

Is Run Hide Fight a great movie? No. But it also isn’t a bad movie. To its credit, it is, like the vast majority of Hollywood’s output, just a plain old regular movie…but that is a huge first baby step for conservatives trying to get into the pop culture game.

The problem is the film is only streaming on The Daily Wire and to see it you must pay to subscribe. I understand what Shapiro is trying to do with this business plan, but I think it’s terribly flawed.

This film is definitely geared toward a teen audience and what Shapiro wants to do is bring young adults to his website to see his lone film, and then stick around to read and listen to right-wing news in the hopes of bringing them into the conservative fold.

This single film alone just isn’t good enough though for some teenager to expend enough time, mental energy and money to actually subscribe to a website they’ll only use once to watch a middling movie in a market already flooded with a cornucopia of middling movies.

Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu or the myriad of other streaming services are teeming with a plethora of similarly mediocre, mildly entertaining films, whereas The Daily Wire only has this one.

Sure, the people who already subscribe will be happy to have access to Run Hide Fight, but by limiting who can see the film, Shapiro is just reinforcing his echo chamber and not expanding his reach, which if conservatives want to get into the pop culture war should be his ultimate goal.

If Run Hide Fight were available on video-on-demand and anybody could rent it for $5 or buy it for $15, thousands of young adults would watch it and it could maybe help The Daily Wire build a relationship with an untapped audience. If VOD services refused to carry the film, that would only generate free publicity and rebel cache for the movie.

Shapiro’s current business model loses out on the money from expanded access via video-on-demand and myopically cuts off his right-wing nose to spite his liberal-hating face by letting only true blue conservatives see it.

As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression, and Run Hide Fight is a decent enough teen action thriller that it would make a good impression on young adult audiences, if only they had an easy opportunity to see it.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Hillbilly Elegy and the Culture War Clash

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 11 seconds

IS HILLBILLY ELEGY A TRULY TERRIBLE MOVIE OR ARE LIBERAL CRITICS BLATANTLY BIASED?

The new Netflix film Hillbilly Elegy chronicles life among a dysfunctional white working class Appalachian family and savage reviews from liberal critics has triggered another battle in the culture war.

Hillbilly Elegy, the new film from Oscar winning director Ron Howard, premiered to much fanfare and controversy on Netflix Tuesday.

The film, which stars perennial Oscar nominees Amy Adams and Glenn Close, is based on J.D. Vance’s 2016 autobiography of the same name, and tells the story of how Vance escaped his chaotic upbringing at the hands of his white-working class Appalachian family, most notably his volcanically erratic mother Bev and his hard-edged grandmother Mamaw, and became a Yale Law School graduate.

The book Hillbilly Elegy became a cause célèbre in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election victory because it gave the establishment a glimpse into the misunderstood white working class and poor folk from flyover country that had come out en masse for Trump.

Among the media elite, the shine wore off of Vance and his book pretty quickly, though, as he was labeled too conservative for consumption after having the temerity to label his hometown hillbilly culture as corrosive and self-destructive. Vance’s critique of the Appalachian white working class was just too pro-personal responsibility for the liberal establishment’s tastes.

It is in this context that Hillbilly Elegy has come out in film form and generated a great deal of vitriol and venom from mainstream movie critics.

For example, Ty Burr of the Boston Globe proclaimed it “poverty porn”. Michael O’Sullivan of the Washington Post called it “almost laughably bad – if it weren’t so melodramatic”. And Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times derisively decried the movie as “an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics”.

These critical eviscerations are not anomalies as the film currently has a dismal 25% critical score review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. There is some pushback though, as the film currently boasts a robust 89% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes.

In response to the cavalcade of critical denouncements, noted conservative pundit Ben Shapiro tweeted about the film “I've seen "Hillbilly Elegy." Amy Adams and Glenn Close are both terrific. The movie is a well-told family drama. The reason the critics are crapping all over it is simple: the book was treated as humanizing "Trump supporters," and is now a Bad Book™. So the movie is also Bad™.”

My experience of Hillbilly Elegy began when I read and the book back in 2016. I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it to be an extremely insightful and compelling account.

Hillbilly Elegy is an important book and it should have been an important movie…but having seen it I can report that it most assuredly is not. Instead it is a maudlin, dramatically obtuse, narratively incoherent, appallingly poorly made and atrociously amateurish cinematic venture.

Director Ron Howard is an artistic eunuch not exactly known for his deft cinematic touch, and he is as ham-fisted as ever on Hillbilly Elegy.  Howard clumsily creates a contrived drama and fumbles the film’s flimsy narrative to such an egregious degree as to be cinematically criminal.

Howard’s visually unimaginative, painfully trite and obscenely shallow approach reduces Vance’s dramatically potent life story into a cinematically flaccid cross between a Lifetime movie, an ABC After-School Special and an anti-drug public service announcement.

As for the acting? Amy Adams is one of the best actresses around, but her performance as the volatile Bev is forced and rings entirely false. Decked out in her oversized ‘mom jeans’, with frizzy hair and sans makeup, Adams is devoid of both subtly and humanity. Adams’ performance is such an over-the-top, one-note caricature it is actually embarrassing.

Glenn Close contrived performance as the foul-mouthed matriarch Mamaw doesn’t fare much better. Both Close and Adams are obviously angling for an Oscar with their ugly-fied, faux-gritty acting, but they end up being uncomfortably shallow and cartoonish in their roles.

Ben Shapiro claiming that Hillbilly Elegy is “well-told” and that Adams and Close are “terrific” only proves that he is either being intentionally contrarian in order to stoke the culture war or he really doesn’t know a goddamn thing about movies and acting. I promise you, Hillbilly Elegy is not the hill(billy) that Ben Shapiro should be willing to die on.

With that said, I have no doubt that liberal critics are gleefully overplaying the very bad hand that is Hillbilly Elegy. If the film were made by a minority director as opposed to a pasty white one, and dealt with black poverty as opposed to poor white people, their criticisms of it would be substantially more delicate and thoughtful.

White liberal critics have long been protective and paternalistic toward black artists and films. Examples of which can be found in the critical reception of Spike Lee’s film Da Five Bloods (2020) and Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time (2018). Both movies are dreadful cinematic disasters, but critics fawned over Da Five Bloods and were wholly encouraging of DuVernay’s abysmal film because of its “diversity”.

Hillbilly Elegy could have been treated with the same kid gloves and rose-colored glasses as Lee and DuVernay’s work- but wasn’t, and one can surmise that the white working class subject matter and the conservative politics of the protagonist are a major reason why.

So is Hillbilly Elegy truly that terrible or as Ben Shapiro suggests are liberal movie critics blatantly biased against it?

The answer is definitely…YES…to both.

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Ron Howard at his worst. Just an embarrassingly terrible movie with terrible performances and terrible writing and terrible directing and everything is terrible.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020