Run Sweetheart Run (2022) - Movie Review
What do you get when you take an intriguing premise, a stellar leading lady, a fantastic villain, and then you attempt to shoe-in a ton of over-the-top wokeness at the very end?
A completely uneven mess of a movie, that’s what.
Let’s discuss…
Let me start by saying that this film has a knockout cast, with an incredible leading lady in Ella Balinska. The villain is also played by a quality actor in Pilou Asbaek. It has an incredible cast of supporting players in Clark Gregg, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Ava Grey, and Dayo Okeniyi. It also has an incredible musical score and a great visual aesthetic.
And somehow they ruined it.
But before I go into the depressing stuff…
Run Sweetheart Run is 2020 supernatural thriller brought to us by director Shana Feste and THREE writers. As we discussed in the Tournament of Champions review, this is the kiss of death for any horror film. As for the director, her biggest achievement was the unmitigated disaster Country Strong which bombed at the box office with Feste writing and directing. She has no horror experience, which explains part of what went wrong here.
The other issue is that the two other writers who worked on this film had no experience in writing horror or thrillers and both have only had minor writing gigs on cancelled television shows.
Combine the inexperience in the genre with too many cooks in the kitchen and you get the mess that was Run Sweetheart Run.
The film focuses on Cherie, a young single mother trying to make her way in corporate America despite immense misogyny and sexism all around her. Every man in her workplace is an evil pig, which as she works in a law office—is extremely believable, but he boss seems to be looking out for her. He set her up on a blind date with one his oldest, richest clients. A date that goes smoothly, until the man Cherie is falling for begins to beat her within an inch of her life and she’s forced to run. Thus begins a game this man has played many times before. Run till dawn or get devoured by this unstoppable monster. Will Cherie survive the night, or will she be another face on the rising posters lining Los Angeles?
The first forty-five minutes of this film are lights out. I was so impressed by the tension and brutality at play that I even exclaimed, “Damn this is good,” to my viewing partner Leslie. Then, as the film get through to the end of the second act, we’re given this terrible twist that ruins everything.
I’m not calling out spoilers, because I can’t recommend any actually watch this move—so I’m just going to blow the twist out in the open folks.
The man chasing her is the Devil. He was supposedly sent to earth to guide mankind, but instead turned mankind against women and put men in charge for… reasons.
Now, as someone who attended seminary and also took courses in world religions and cults, I can say with confidence that this idea is not based in any kind of religious theory as most all religions accept that angels are non-binary beings as gender is a wholly human concept. Yes, some angels had male names in the Bible—but that’s because human men adapted the scriptures and picked and chose what to keep at each turn. The devil, in all religions, was fallen before the creation of man.
If they had wanted this idea to actually work, they’d have needed a hell of a lot more than a 10 minute exposition dump over an 80’s style montage of our heroine putting on an extremely ugly karate gi for no reason.
You heard me.
The hero of our film has to give up and ask for help from a woman who says she’s an angel and who has an army training in teakwando for no reason. It’s implied that the dozens and dozens of women in her underground layer are survivors of the devil’s game, but earlier in the film it’s shown that no one ever escapes. He’s killed dozens and dozens of women in the last few months alone.
And yet, magically there’s dozens and dozens that survived? It’s a leap in logic that’s never explains and it doesn’t matter, because these warrior women don’t actually fight—they throw rocks through poorly CGI’d window panes.
Our heroine doesn’t get to overcome her monster and take her own strength. She has to be saved by an angel woman who shows literally no power other than flicking a lighter.
The movie goes from an incredible message of a single woman fighting to survive against all odds against an unfair villain and the society he thrives within… to her relinquishing her victory to a character that has a total of 3 minutes of screen time.
And all of this is given to us in a horrible exposition jump.
This is where the too many cooks in the kitchen issue and studio interference seems probable.
Because you can completely see that the quality of film drops visually and sound design wise at the moment our heroine meets The First Lady. That’s the “angel” I was mentioning before. Also, many scenes shown in the trailers are not in this film.
That tells me that the original film was shown to a test audience and the feedback on the third act was negative, so the studio had reshoots done to shape this new, completely shitty ending.
One of the writers probably said, “oh wait, what if it’s angels and demons? That’s cool right?”
and then we got this pile of dog shit.
I’m so upset, because the first forty-five minutes of this film were an intense, feminist epic that could have redefined a genre much like Revenge did in 2017.
The cuts and edits to the ending of the film, the exposition dump, the stupid ass montage, all of it was a disservice to the actors who played their hearts out making this film and to the audience who wanted to watch it.
These actors deserved better.
Please support the players in this film. Watch their other projects, follow their social media.
Ella Balinska is a star in the making and I hope she gets pushed to the moon, but this movie is not worthy of her or any of the potential viewers time.
Another ball dropped by Blumhouse in their haste to push out as many trash films to streaming as they can.
If you do want to punish yourself, this is available to stream exclusively on Amazon Prime.
