You Can’t Run Forever

Grade: C+

I’ve heard from people who read multiple books at the same time that you’re bound to find parallels in the midst of them. I have the same experience with seeing 3 to 5 movies a week. You Can’t Run Forever briefly and sporadically touches on delinquency in taking your mental health meds, a la Turtles All the Way Down – and whether there really is something “wrong” with a person, like in Fitting In. A character is very pregnant, which made me think of Babes. The “stalker in the woods” element reminded me of The Strangers: Chapter 1. You Can’t Run Forever is a mild thriller which would have made a perfectly solid TV movie of the week. Nobody ever speaks the namesake phrase in it, thankfully – but by the end, we know what it means.

Its significance is two-fold. It’s applicable to the main cat-and-mouse plot line, obviously, and could also mean that you can’t be aloof and avoid your struggles forever. Sooner or later you’ll need to lean on friends and family to help you through. One of our main characters is teenager Miranda, who has had a rough go since discovering her father’s body at the end of a noose a year before. Since then, she has been given meds that she hoards rather than takes, and a frequent pastime is climbing high up a tree in the backyard. If you think this will come into play later on, you would be correct. She is now part of a blended family. Her stepfather has a college-age daughter, and Miranda has a half-brother due any day now. You can do the math with the timing of the pregnancy and when Miranda’s mom’s first husband died. That was a quick cut and paste, or maybe something was transpiring before that, and it had something to do with dad taking his life.

That would be a supremely interesting aspect to explore, but unfortunately the movie doesn’t go there. We meet another character before the introduction of Miranda and her family, so let me go back to the first scene. Wade (J.K. Simmons) rides a motorcycle into a gas station in the middle of nowhere. He nonchalantly shoots and kills a few people, starting with the owner of a very yappy dog. No animals are harmed, but the dog finally shuts up. “Why are you doing this,” he’s asked. His reply is “Does it matter?”

Other critics have mentioned exactly what happens to get us into Wade’s chase after Miranda in the woods, but I won’t. I enjoyed much of what I saw during this segment of the film. I appreciated that Simmons isn’t one of those omnipotent, omniscient movie killers who is able to show up everywhere. That is refreshingly kept at bay. He is a master at playing an abusive, manipulative sociopath; he won an Oscar for doing that in Whiplash, one of my favorite movies. There’s some humor in the fact that You Can’t Run Forever is directed and co-written by his wife Michelle Schumacher. There are no cheap jump scares, or really any. The lovely colors in the forest and the crackling campfire make this a fine potential watch in late September, to kick off the fall.

There are just enough annoying little nitpicky things here that keep me from recommending it. We are provided with a backstory for Wade, and are expected to believe his first kill WAS his first kill. He has the same casualness of someone who has done this before, and seems to think moving a trash bin a couple feet will solve a problem. The song that plays at the end has a piano lick that sounds like the main theme to The Room. Unintentional laughs there. After all that the characters have been through, they move on with their lives awfully easily, with little regard for the years of therapy, conversations, and unpacking that will lie ahead. I almost hope you see this movie, so you can let me know if it came together any better for you. As for me, You Can’t Run Forever is – dare I say it – not quite my tempo.

Grade: C+