RUNNING WILD – Review

Review by Stephen Tronicek

RUNNING WILD plays like if Michael Bay directed Flicka and as the old saying goes two wrongs do not make a right. Now, if you enjoy Michael Bay (Pain and Gain and The Rock are awesome) and you enjoy Flicka, well then this might just be the movie for you. If those movies aren’t your cup of tea, though, you might want to steer clear.

The bringing up of those two recognizable names (Flicka maybe less than Michael Bay) comes with a good purpose in that the film emulates the style of one and the familiar plot elements of the other. Running Wild is about a woman (Dorian Brown, who was excellent on Wilfred) trying to keep her ranch afloat after the death of her husband. She finds a number of wild horses and brings them in with a government program that helps inmates by allowing the inmates to train horses. The inmates bond with the horses, but soon a philanthropist (Sharon Stone) wants to buy them up. Stone is soon threatening to slander the ranch owner if she doesn’t release the horses.
Already, one can tell that there is a whole lot of plot going on, and the first problem comes in how the film handles the progressing storyline. Similar to the films of modern blockbuster makers, the overall structural editing is fragmented, making the flow of events jarring and noticeable. The keep the farm afloat part of the story soon skips into the inmate program, which then becomes about protests to “free the horses,” all finally ending up on a heavy-handed and important message about how wild horses need to be saved. Now, all of those are potentially good storylines, but with every single one of them going on the dialogue is almost reduced to just the exposition that is needed to keep the plot racing at the speed that it goes. There’s no downtime when the movie slows down to let us know the characters.

When the movie does attempt to do just that, it’s marred by some bad mechanical editing with conversations attempting to make innovative compositions, but losing this attempted freshness within flat, saccharine compositions and an overabundance of cuts. It’s a bit disorienting, especially when you consider that the film is predominantly overlit making the characters stick out from the background of exterior shots in a way that looks unnatural. The film does provide some spectacular vista shots of the land and the horses to make up for its missteps.

The characters don’t find themselves being anything meaningful and the over expositional dialogue doesn’t help. The ranch owner, Stella, is the only character that seems to have any development but seems to overact some of the scenes that require more subtlety. The inmates have seemingly been reduced to a number of stereotypes: one being the Scottish one, one being the black one, and the others being such non-entities that you might be caught wondering what they’re doing there in the first place. Sharon Stone does give the film some novelty though as you’re afforded the ability to think about how great Casino and Total Recall were during the time you’re watching this one.

RUNNING WILD is one of those movies that with as much as it’s trying to say feels hollow. It’s a thin plot construct (or rather a few) draped over a skeleton of a movie. It certainly has some important things to say about the treatment of horses and the state of wild horses in the United States, but it just doesn’t come together.

 1 1/2 of 5 Stars

RUNNING WILD is currently playing in selected theaters