#015 - running with the devil (2019)
hello and welcome to my weblog. tonight i watched running with the devil (2019)
this movie opens on a man, naked except for the bag on his head, lying on the floor of a restroom. there is blood on the floor, his blood, and he is chained to a toilet. this is symbolism. the man represents the audience of this movie.
nic cage plays “the cook” who makes pizzas at a pizzeria. but this is just his cover identity - he is actually the regional manager of cocaine. there is a problem with his “product” so he goes all undercover boss from colombia to mexico to the pacific northwest to find the problem.
none of the characters in this movie have names; they’re only “the farmer”, “the cook”, “the agent in charge”. laurence fishburne plays “the man”. because i watched this with closed captioning, i knew that there was a “snitch” and an “executioner” before either of those characters showed any sign of performing their name-tasks. i don’t know what the point of this naming convention was supposed to be (clinical detachment?) but it just felt really lazy. the same amount of care went into the character development and plot. most scenes are just people going to a place to do one specific task; this movie was like a 90 minute montage. did these characters feel things? did they have motivations? i do not know.
there was one part of this that was really funny to me and that was multiple characters in the cocaine business kept reading a very fake looking textbook whose cover was just a photo of clouds with the title “corporate leadership”