Run Hide Fight

Not bad action movie for Daily Wire.
I wrote most of this while I was watching the film with my girlfriend, so typos beware.

SPOILERS AHEAD

We were about 40 minutes into the movie when I turned to my partner and asked her, “Is this movie propaganda?” We had put it on because she likes the actress that plays the main character, we had no idea who made the movie or what it was about. So mid movie I do a quick Google search. Daily Wire. Holy fuck. It’s a Hallmark movie on trenbolone with a hand gun and confusing sexual urges.

So we get police propaganda as soon as they’re headed towards the school. The police chief is telling his subordinate to wait before going in, that they need a plan for the hostage situation so nobody dies. Then the lone officer, the one with courage, dies of course. See, this is why the police don’t rush in to save your children. If they did they might die because they didn’t plan and coordinate. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together could tell you that adults with firearms training should be able to handle a couple of kids with handguns. God forbid they put themselves in a tiny amount of risk to save lives. We all know they’re only employed to protect property and oppress the working class though, now more than ever that reality is hard to hide.

Next we get the weak anarchist character, Tristan the leader of the school shooters. He’s criticizing the school’s plans, talking about how everything they’re supposed to do is laid out in public meetings and put in books for citizens to read, so anyone can plan an attack around what the administration publishes. Honestly, it’s a fair critique. Schools probably shouldn’t be publishing detailed response plans, and letting people vote on emergency procedures isn’t necessarily the best way to handle things. Not sure what to do about the fact that they run the drills with the students, if it’s a student doing the crime.

Of course a young lady gets the chance to tell him that God lets people make their own choices and that he chose evil. Next thing you know he’s sexually assaulting his teacher. Interesting choice for the Daily Wire to strip this lady and have her tits out on screen. If this movie had been made with a left-wing tilt I’m sure they’d be tearing this scene apart.

So now our protagonist has killed one of the shooters after wrestling with the female member of the group. Earlier she was complaining about seeing her dead mother, but now she’s helping save the day. One thing that started to stick out to me as the movie went on is that none of these shooters actually feel like real people. They feel like a checklist. The leader is an anarchist. The skinhead is sexually confused, and not even a skinhead I just call him that. They made sure to say hey at least we arent nazis as if its some retort for all the times they had been called that in some comment section. They don’t like capitalism. They’ve got relationship drama. They livestream. Every stereotype gets piled into one group like somebody at the Daily Wire sat down and asked “what does a conservative parent think a school shooter looks like?” and then just wrote all of that into the script.

The weird thing is they almost touch on some real issues. A lot of these kids seem traumatized, isolated, angry, or broken in some way, but the movie never actually explores any of that. The skinhead is having some sort of flashback that the leader has to deal with. When he gets down there the skinhead tries to kiss him and they have to talk about love in their little polycule. Trauma isn’t treated like something that shaped these people, it’s just a character trait they throw on the screen before moving onto the next action scene. The protagonist is dealing with her mother’s death, half the school seems to have some tragic backstory, but none of it really matters. Trauma in this movie isn’t a theme, it’s basically a superhero origin story. Everybody gets one sad thing that happened to them and then the movie moves on. It feels like the writers wanted the emotional weight of exploring trauma without actually doing any of the work.

Now the protagonist catches Kip while he’s using a shotgun to break into classrooms and herd more students into the cafeteria. She handcuffs him in the auditorium and starts talking to her mother about how she’s been repressing her trauma. Ten minutes go by and not much really happens. She gives a moral lecture to a kid who has no personality and no real reason for comitting violence other than he got picked on. Then we cut to a radio show talking about how video games don’t cause violence. Not sure if this is supposed to be a comment on liberal media, but it feels exactly like something the Daily Wire would do. Then we get an even better critique of the media machine, which the Daily Wire is a part of and exploits just like everybody else, where the sheriff is trying to get the local news team to stop broadcasting police operations live but has to barter with them as the guy says ” as long as I can get a better shot.”

The calm, cool sheriff has it all under control though. If only people would listen it would already be over. Get out of the way. Let the cops organize. Put your body armor on. And when it’s safe to do so we’ll go in. The stupid anarchist is easily baited by the sheriff into wasting time and allowing more students to be saved. But the stupid media people are showing things they shouldn’t, allowing the shooters to know something is up. If only the liberal media didn’t try to capitalize on every tradgedy the strong police officer could take control of the situation.

The funniest part is the movie can’t decide what its politics actually are. The cops are simultaneously heroes and idiots. The schools are incompetent but we’re supposed to trust them. The media is evil but half the plot depends on media and communication. The sheriff is portrayed as the smartest guy in the room, but the movie keeps resolving problems by having random civilians ignore him and do their own thing. It spends two hours telling us institutions are failing and then turns around and asks us to trust those same institutions whenever it’s convinient. It feels less like a political message and more like three different political messages fighting each other for screen time.

Now the main shooter has called our protagonist to the cafeteria under threat of killing a student every five minutes, so she’s going to heroically go save the day. Her dad has heard this and he’s got his rifle. He’s going to heroically save the day too. And the sheriff would have already saved the day if liberal policies had allowed him to. So in about a minute she somehow convinces Kip to redeem himself by grabbing a shotgun and fighting back. He fucking dies of course. Our protagonist and the livestream kid escape, only for the skinhead to catch up with her and corner her in the science room. But don’t worry, dad makes a great shot and blows his head off. The useless cops immediately arrest the dad. If only our strong conservative men were all allowed to aim rifles into schools during active shootings and personally decide which students are threats. Holy fuck. This movie couldn’t be more of a goof if they had written it as a comedy, which I genuinely thought they had about 45 minutes in.

She gets Tristan on the phone and throws him off his plan by telling him nobody will remember him. This is actually one of the more interesting things in the movie because there is a real conversation to be had about how the media handles school shootings. Books have been written about it, countless meetings held, councils formed and dissolved, all trying to deal with the fact that some shooters seem to be motivated by the fame. The media uses their full names, shows their photos on prime time news, writes books about them, publishes endless articles, and otherwise gives them exactly the attention they’re looking for. Well some of them at least, the ones not done by the FBI. It’s one of the few moments where the movie accidentally stumbles into a legitimate point.

So the reasonable local sheriff gets her out of the SWAT vehicle. She gets to talk to her dad, who’s been arrested for doing the right thing and is sitting in the back of a squad car. She sees her boyfriend and gets confirmation he’s going to be alright. Then she sees Tristan. Turns out it wasn’t him who got blown up. Where’s your rifle dad? She gets to shoot him while he’s digging through an ammo box pulling out a passport and a stack of cash. Somehow these school shooters always manage to save up more money working at Wendy’s than people with actual salaries.

Now the ending ties back to the beginning. She recites what her dad told her about mercy killing the deer, picks up a rock, and then decides not to smash his head in. Instead she tells him he deserves to suffer. Really odd mixed messaging from the supposedly Christian media outlet behind the film. Also oddly convinient that the cops didn’t secure the loose firearm her dad used and just left it sitting there.

Honestly I didn’t hate this movie. It had decent action scenes, the main character actually had some development even if it was fairly shallow, and I couldn’t tell whether we were supposed to feel good at the end or not. What distracted me through the entire film was the obvious political posturing, and worse than that it wasn’t even coherent. The movie spends most of its runtime building toward the classic conservative fantasy that all we need is a good guy with a gun. I own firearms, I seldom go anywhere without one. I think responsible citizens should keep one on them and train regularly to use them. The problem is the movie accidentally undermines its own point. Most of what saves people isn’t guns. It’s the protagonist sneaking around, lying to the shooters, communicating with people, manipulating them, and getting lucky. The dad gets his hero moment sure, but if anything the movie spends two hours showing that one guy with a rifle isn’t enough to solve the situation. If we are critiquing school policies or the police we have a bit more traction there, but its still just poorly done.

I’m also not sure how a media company that’s supposed to represent Christian values can justify finding a well endowed actress and exposing her breasts just to show how depraved the villain is while simultaneously criticizing every other piece of media for much milder content. Not to mention the movie can’t decide whether institutions are strong or weak, whether trauma matters or doesn’t, whether the police are heroes or cowards, or whether the media is responsible for creating these events or just reporting on them. By the end it felt less like a movie with a message and more like a bunch of Daily Wire talking points stitched together with a surprisingly decent action movie hiding underneath.

Footnotes

Run Hide Fight was written and directed by Kyle Rankin. The film was not originally produced by The Daily Wire. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2020 and was later acquired by The Daily Wire for North American distribution. This means many people, myself included, probably watched it through a political lens that wasn’t necessarily present when it was first written and produced.

In interviews, Rankin said he wanted the film to “walk a political line” and hoped people from different political viewpoints could both find something to connect with. That honestly explains a lot. The movie often feels like it’s trying to deliver several different political messages at the same time, which may be why the politics feel confused and occasionally contradictory.

Rankin has said the core idea was not originally political, but rather a story about bravery and ordinary people fighting back during a terrible situation. He described the film as being about courage, selflessness, and putting others ahead of yourself. I did like some of the action parts of the film, but they missed out on a lot of character development.

The film’s origin was influenced by real personal tragedies. Rankin’s best friend was murdered in 1999, and producer Dallas Sonnier had also lost both of his parents in separate gun-related incidents. According to Rankin, those experiences influenced how they approached the subject matter.

Rankin studied broadcast journalism and has said he intentionally included criticism of media coverage during crisis events. He argued that news organizations can become focused on ratings, dramatic footage, and being first to report, sometimes without considering the consequences. This is one of the few themes in the movie that I think lands reasonably well.

The Daily Wire release included not only the movie but also behind-the-scenes content, interviews with Kyle Rankin, and discussions with school safety experts. The company heavily marketed the film as both an action thriller and a commentary on modern responses to school shootings. So that was on the nose with everything that stuck out painfully when I watched it.