When Quentin Tarantino revitalized the gangster movie in the early to mid 1990s, he brought a visual panache to the genre and gave us a variety of trashy yet compelling stories of urban lowlifes, where the verbal set piece often took precedence over the action set piece. Tarantino’s unique spin on age-old conventions made the gangster genre seem fresh, exciting and new. Director Wayne Kramer’s “Running Scared” bludgeons Tarantino’s subtleties of dialogue and storytelling, pushing the viewer’s face into the mud of the New York/New Jersey underworld, a place populated with one-dimensional hoodlums, bent cops, pimps and pedophiles. Where Tarantino offers his audience a head rush of exiting stories, characters and set pieces, “Running Scared” leaves nothing more than a headache.

Paul Walker (“The Fast and the Furious”) plays Joey Gazelle, a small time gangster who is charged with disposing of a gun used in the slaying of a gang of crooked cops. Unfortunately, his son’s best friend, Oleg (Cameron Bright), steals the gun, puts a bullet through his abusive stepfather (John Noble) and runs off into the night. So begins a whirlwind tour of Kramer’s cityscape as Gazelle tries to retrieve the gun and the boy while being pursued by the police and Italian and Russian mobsters.

Kramer begins the film with some flashy ricocheting pieces of camera work and initially interesting characters (something he seemed much more adept at with 2003’s “The Cooler”). Oleg’s stepfather is a Russian immigrant obsessed with John Wayne, whose image he proudly has tattooed on his back. However, he cannot stand it when Wayne dies in his movies, an experience he did not have with the edited versions he watched in Russia as a child. Chazz Palminteri, always watchable, pops up as a seedy detective eagerly pursuing the gun to save his own ass. Unfortunately, his screen time is diminished to make way for a few more shoot-outs. Indeed, soon enough the film boneheadedly suspends dialogue and narrative for an almost straightforward reconstruction of video game Grand Theft Auto. The violence is unrelenting, with the film trying in vain to come up with even nastier and more original ways of killing its seemingly endless array of gun fodder. Hoodlums are shot in the groin, have their ears bitten off and are blown up in toilet cubicles—all as subtle as a bullet in the head, which, by the way, also happens several times.

Violence is acceptable in film; it’s just that “Running Scared” over-bakes it and simply offers nothing else. Moreover, that this violence is frequently witnessed by the child characters in the film is also a little disturbing. And when it seems that Kramer cannot scrape the grime from the barrel anymore, he introduces a pedophile husband and wife who are into making snuff movies with children they have kidnapped. In this respect, “Running Scared” makes “Pulp Fiction” look like “The Wizard of Oz.” Rumors abound that the movie is already garnering cult status amongst some moviegoers. However, this reviewer found “Running Scared” almost impossible to watch—a bloody, violent and not very clever mess.