Deborah Ross

Predictable, repetitive and exploitative: Run Hide Fight reviewed

It's Die Hard set in a school but without Bruce Willis and its overall message is simple: America’s gun problem can only be solved by more guns

Isabel May as brave Zoe in the predictable, repetitive and exploitative Run Hide Fight. Image: Bonfire Legend

Deborah Ross has narrated this article for you to listen to.

In this line of business you receive many emails from PRs ‘reaching out’ about their particular film, which I really must see, as it wowed a festival in Bulgaria. But the other day, a PR reached out to boast excitedly about a film because it had been savaged, which was a first. ‘The film has absolutely enraged Hollywood critics,’ this person wrote, with obvious pride, before quoting the following from reviews: ‘insanely poor taste’, ‘wildly misjudged’, ‘tone deaf’, ‘gross’. What’s more, this person continued, while critics hate it — it has a critics’ score of 25 per cent at Rotten Tomatoes, the review- aggregator site — audiences are loving it (93 per cent). OK, send it my way, I said, because I was curious, and can also be a fool.

This film is basically Die Hard transported to a school setting, minus Bruce Willis in a vest

The film is Run Hide Fight, which is set amid a high school shooting and had been declared hateful, I was told, because it ‘doesn’t push the usual left-wing agenda on gun control’. It was picked up by the right-wing website Daily Wire, where it is available to subscribers who, given they are subscribers, might be predisposed to love it. What’s unarguable is that they certainly do. It’s ‘the best action thriller ever’. And: ‘Don’t listen to critics, they are clowns.’ And even: ‘Great film… it’s why I want my kids to take their own guns to school.’ I was minded to point out that as you can’t trust kids to pick up a towel or remember their keys you’d probably best not trust them with a lethal weapon, but maybe I’m just being too ‘left-wing’?

Written and directed by Kyle Rankin, the film is basically Die Hard, transported to a school setting, minus Bruce Willis in a vest.

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