Run Sweetheart Run

An often astonishingly intolerable, unwatchable endeavor, Run Sweetheart Run follows a single mother named Cherie (Ella Balinska) as she’s forced to run for her life after a blind date (Pilou Asbæk’s Ethan) turns violent. It’s a familiar yet workable premise that’s employed to perpetually (and increasingly) underwhelming effect by Shana Feste, as the filmmaker, armed with a script written alongside Keith Josef Adkins and Kellee Terrell, delivers a mostly misguided thriller that strikes all the wrong notes virtually from the word go – with the movie’s ongoing emphasis on aggressively heavy-handed instances of social commentary immediately (and effectively) establishing an arms-length atmosphere that prevents the viewer from working up an ounce of interest in (or sympathy for) the one-note protagonist’s plight. Feste’s relentless smug approach to the less-than-subtle material ensures that Run Sweetheart Run suffers from a pervasive (and palpable) lack of forward momentum, and there’s little doubt that the tediousness of the movie’s midsection, which consists entirely of one poorly-conceived, hopelessly tedious set-piece after the next, is compounded by ludicrous and utterly wrongheaded instances of John Wick-like world-building (ie it’s all just so exhaustingly tiresome). By the time the almost comically anticlimactic finale rolls around, Run Sweetheart Run has definitively cemented its place as a bottom-of-the-barrel attempt to fuse horror with real-world, me-too-inspired themes and situations (ie this is ultimately the very worst of the post-Jordan Peele knockoffs to emerge as of late).

no stars out of ****