Running with the Devil (2019)

(On Cable TV, September 2022) Hey, what just happened here? Running with the Devil is a thriller featuring a sequence in which Nicolas Cage spends some time hiking in a forest with Lawrence Fishburne and still it’s a disappointment. Granted, you’re not going to get a comedy out of the whole thing: This is one of those films trying to make a Profound Statement about the war on drugs circa 1995 through a moody plot, an ensemble cast and blue-dominated cinematography. It doesn’t work. There’s a misplaced mixture of realism and wild plotting going on at once, with vigilante justice winning out in the end. Some segments can be interesting (such as the procedural explanation of how drug shipments in the 1990s made their way from Colombia to US city streets, or alternately seeing Fishburne pimping hard on the bling-bling) but it’s not enough. The episodic nature of the story makes it hard to keep a focus, not just on specific characters, but also in narrative progression and tone as well—Running with the Devil goes all the way from sober didacticism to jet-black humour and little of it is actually fun. It’s an unfocused mess (the cast list doesn’t have names, but occupations), and it wastes a lot of good-to-great potential on its way to its disappointing conclusion.