Run Hide Fight (Sky / NOW) Movie Review

Now THIS is how to do an indie riff on Die Hard / Toy Soldiers!

by Casimir Harlow
Movies & TV Shows Review

17

Recommended
Run Hide Fight (Sky / NOW) Movie Review

Shot for $1.5 million, Kyle Rankin's Isabel May-starring indie thriller is surprisingly solid work, somehow managing to respectfully pay lo-fi tribute to classic heavyweight Die Hard.

Whilst the Studios are wondering what to do next with the Die Hard franchise, and Bruce Willis is busy wasting his time on anything but a decent final entry, and whilst the theme of the day appears to be to just contrive anything to fit the profile of a female-led actioner/reboot/remake, no matter how trashy the film (Jolt), Run Hide Fight defies the odds, transforming an impossibly tiny budget into a pretty pleasantly tense and satisfying effort.

 

... defies the odds, transforming an impossibly tiny budget into a pretty pleasantly tense and satisfying effort 

As she nears graduation, Zoe is walking around carrying a lot of anger, with her military dad able to train her to survive, but unable to reach her. When a group of shockingly prepared students tear through the school with guns, looking to go viral with their actions, Zoe inadvertently lands off their radar, running and hiding and - as she realises that nobody else is coming to help - deciding that she may have to fight back.

Run Hide Fight

Run Hide Fight doesn't look like a shoestring budget film, but it probably helps going in with minimal expectations and being pleasantly surprised by what they accomplish here. It's on the same general playing field as effective indie outings like Becky and maybe even Bushwick, but for an even smaller budget that probably wouldn't be enough to get a Skype'd in performance from Willis, they really have worked wonders, giving it a nice, gritty, lived-in feel, bringing out a number of interesting performances, and delivering some satisfying action beats.

Isabel May's resume is pretty thin - with a regular role on Young Sheldon but little else - however she brings a convincingly caustic inner rage to the piece, with the first act devoted to wisely building characters, most notably hers, and giving her a reason to be wandering the halls an equal parts ticking time-bomb and empty shell of a high school kid. Making her almost literally haunted for the duration is a nice change of speed too - it may not work for everybody, but it's certainly something different for an otherwise very Die Hard / John McClane character. Wrong place, wrong time, air ducts, improvised kills, verbal exchanges between the hero and villain over remote comms, plenty of battle wounds and eventually even the dirty vest, May's Zoe is refreshingly plausible at almost all times, gifted some measure of survival skills courtesy of her dad (great support from Thomas Jane here, making amends for co-starring with Willis in Anti-Life) and courage from her mum (Pitch Black's Radha Mitchell, again committing to the solid supporting role), but really just evolving in character naturally over the course of the siege. She's never called upon to be a super-heroine in fights, which leaves it feeling pleasantly grounded despite being ostensibly in traditionally OTT territory.

 

That it manages to basically deliver a pretty respectably lo-fi Die-Hard-in-a-school, on a minuscule budget, without being insulting to its forebear, is something of a miracle

Eli Brown's brains behind the siege is an interesting blend of familiar characters, as if the Anton Yelchin-alike Brown is channelling Ledger's Joker but playing Rickman's Gruber, but it works, particularly when surrounded by a trio of worryingly equally homicidal teen friends that particularly take pleasure in mistreating their former teachers. And it's nice to see Treat Williams (Things to do in Denver when you're Dead) as the local Sheriff, surrounded by a bunch of cops who aren't inept for once, but are hampered by a cleverly orchestrated plan on the part of the terrorising teens, here using the school's own lockdown protocol against them in a mirror to what Gruber did with the police and FBI in Die Hard.

Of course they basically covered similar ground in 1991's Toy Soldiers, but this is leagues apart from that cult favourite, not really going for the Hollywood route at all when it comes to how things play out - they hardly have the budget for it - and working all the better as a result. Sure, it also doesn't even vaguely attempt to get to the heart of gun control, school shootings or anything of the like (watch Paul Greengrass's 22nd July if you want a more documentary approach to the horror of it all), which has certainly pushed a lot of people's buttons, but this simply isn't that kind of film. That it manages to basically deliver a pretty respectably low-fi Die-Hard-in-a-school, on a minuscule budget, without being insulting to its forebear, is something of a miracle. That it does so whilst developing a few nice, original character beats along the way is the cherry on top. Complaining that it hasn't got a social commentary is kinda missing the point; nobody levels that kind of criticism at a Die Hard movie, and that's all this is is shooting for. And it pulls it off pretty damn well.

Run Hide Fight comes to the UK on Sky / NowTV, released on August 15th 2021.

Scores

Verdict

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7

7
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