A retired Navy SEAL who, for a time, became a military advisor on the Colombian drug exchange, Jason Cabell conceived his first solo feature as author-director to tell the tale of that specific commerce “from the point of view of the medication.” The result isn’t exactly a docudrama indictment like “Traffic,” a thriller, and L.A., “Sicario,” a plea for harmless sufferers, or a Tarantino-esque bloody crime comedy. Rather, “Running With the Devil” is all of the above, hopefully blending collectively many narrative and tonal factors right into an extraordinarily cohesive whole.
With a cast of familiar faces toplined with the aid of the inescapable Nicolas Cage, this sprawling yet tight story of rocky unlawful transport needs to provoke audiences whether or not they’re searching out an extreme remedy for trafficking issues or simply violent exhilaration. It will locate viewers normally through domestic codecs, as “Running” bows this weekend on simply 10 U.S. Screens simultaneous with VOD and digital release.
After an ominous prologue that we’ll sooner or later get back to regarding the bleak destiny of a sure, naked guy, Cabell’s script starts to introduce his raft of characters a few weeks in advance. A little female who tells her Seattle college bus motive force, “I can’t wake them up,” is deposited into the care of an aunt, her parents having fatally OD’d at some stage in the night. That aunt is a federal agent (Leslie Bibb) for whom the war on tablets was given very personally. Meanwhile, an excessive-rolling dealer (Laurence Fishburne) is getting a touch too familiar with his very own powdery wares, somehow surviving an epic nasal debauch that leaves less-lucky prostitutes dead in his bed.
Such bad-for-business mishaps result in a “first-class control” professional (Cage) being ordered to depart his decent Stateside life and attend to administrative issues alongside the delivery chain, all the way down to Bogota. Well, outside the capital, the cycle of narco-commerce originates with the low-paid toil of a farmer (Clifton Collins Jr.) and his spouse (Natalia Reyes). They harvest coca leaves, do the preliminary processing, and hike every new load of cocaine bricks to the following carrier in a close-to-infinite line of mules. At this beginning point, the stuff is worth a chunk over $1,000 a kilo. Onscreen snapshots tell us that by the point it’s made its complete journey northward, that fee can have expanded about thirtyfold.
Less precious are the many lives judged expendable in the direction. Given diverse attempted robberies, police searches, double-crossings, federal investigators interfering with the transit manner, and different obstacles, that is no question a corpse-strewn odyssey. But it in no way seems outlandish or gratuitous in Cabell’s handling, irrespective of the variety of the setting from the penthouse to strip club to the torture chamber, or the way of delivery from the truck to parachute to snowshoe.
It is becoming almost a giant, exceptional corpse story, “Running,” even though it keeps its cool irrespective of how arbitrarily severe the plot twists are. There’s a lot of abrupt, intense violence here. Yet, those drastic reversals of fortune aren’t dwelt on, underlining the truth that such a life-taking method is little or no help to the ones involved, specifically to characters called the Boss (Barry Pepper) or the Executioner (Cole Hauser).
No one here gets the right call. What would possibly in other fingers as a tragedy is lent additional emotional distance by way of the reality that there are almost no innocent sufferers here. Nearly everyone who suffers a grim fate is already implicated, in a single way or another. “Running With the Devil” has little overt moralizing; its largest takeaway is that the globe-trotting, Rube Goldbergian system it tracks step by step constitutes a massive chew of the worldwide economic system, whether we’re willing to admit it or not.
Handing himself a formidable script with numerous logistical and tonally demanding situations, Cabell (who co-directed 2016’s “Smoke Filled Lungs”) handles matters with vast panache, handing over a colorful bundle that nevertheless works tough to avoid being showy or sensational. His performance is admirably poker-faced and droll for the most part, along with the extra ordinarily gonzo Cage in wry, world-weary mode, and Fishburne in the form of the slave-to-hedonistic-excess role that would typically visit his co-famous person.
When these two sooner or later get several scenes together, their chemistry mixes well, as do the other United States along the way. Particularly top are Bibb, an all-business Fed who turns out to have a seriously caustic facet, and Adam Goldberg as a hapless person who becomes a snitch. His humorous performance is not in any respect compromised by having to spend considerable time hanging from a chain in bikini briefs.
Duly shot in the region (albeit with a few fudging, while New Mexico mountains sub for scenes set on the Canadian border), the Colombia-U.S. Manufacturing is right-searching and accomplished on all tech and layout ranges. The best minor misstep is a preliminary excess of leap cuts in editor Jordan Goldman’s, in any other case, astute meeting.
