Paul Walker’s attempt to toughen up, like Ashton Kutcher’s in The Butterfly Effect, feels the need to include child pornography as a plot point. Even without that stomach-churning element, Running Scared – in which Walker’s low-level mobster spends one night trying to recover an incriminating gun – operates as an abhorrent exercise in child endangerment. If you’ve become so callous to thrillers that you need a tyke held at gunpoint – or worse – to register suspense, this movie should do the trick.
