JK Simmons is an actor who is known for being J Jonah Jameson in the Spiderman films and many other roles, including his Oscar-winning performance in Whiplash as the overbearing band instructor Terence Fletcher. He goes to the dark side once again as a killer of innocents in You Can’t Run Forever.  A role he embraces wholeheartedly.

Miranda (Isabelle Anaya) is a teenager who lives with her pregnant mother, Jenny (Fernanda Urrejola), and her stepfather Eddie (Alan Leech). She is recovering from the loss of her father due to suicide, but she has closed out her parents. A trip with her stepfather to pick up a bassinet for her new little brother, who’s on the way, hopes to change that. Unbeknownst to them, a killer is on the loose, and she happens upon the unsuspecting duo. Tragedy ensues as the killer played by Simmons strikes close to home for this girl. She has to run for her life.

This film has a typical story that I’ve seen before, just in a different context. Killers have been chasing victims for decades now in films. The thing that makes this one different is the killer’s motivations.  Which I won’t spoil here, but I can see why a man would be drawn to doing things like this. Life is hard sometimes, as most people have probably found out in their own lives. History has proven that people have been driven to do bad things in the name of stress, anxiety, and being pushed over the edge. This character played by Simmons is no different than others in many movies in the past.

I remember a book I had when I was younger, called The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordan. Where a girl was lost in the woods with men chasing after her. These two stories are similar in a way. With Simmons’ character chasing after her, the Anaya character is just trying to survive. He is literally running for her life. She experienced falls, cuts and buzzes, and some traumatic things she won’t forget. I’ve seen better, though, in this sort of survival tale. 

Michelle Schumacher, as director, along with Carolyn Carpenter as writer’s have tried to create a female empowerment movie with this survival tale. They put women in all the power positions except for the Simmons character, who is the epitome of evil from the female perspective. They want him to come off exactly the way the viewer or any other woman would see him. As nasty as you could get, On the flipside, these women portrayed in the movie come across as good people. There is nothing wrong with that, except that this film makes it blatantly obvious that the women are the good guys, and Simmons is the embodiment of evil. Try not to make it so obvious in the future, please. That is, if you want to make a movie that is taken a little bit more seriously, then this will be taken.

Simmons is playing his role a little over the top, but he has been known to do that in the past. He seems to enjoy playing a campy villain once in a while. That’s no excuse for the rest of the cast, who seem like that are reading their lines off of a teleprompter.  They are all wooden, and I didn’t believe much of what they were saying. These are supposed to be dire circumstances, and I felt like I didn’t care what happened to the people in need of help. The acting from everybody was terrible. 

You Can’t Run Forever is a film at its core trying to be a female empowerment story. A girl and her mother overcoming odds and a psychotic killer on the loose. I felt more empathy for the killer played by Simmons than the woman. His backstory was more interesting to me regarding what drove him to do these reprehensible acts of violence.  I’m not condoning them by any means, but I thought he was the better character in the film. The woman acted pretty wooden, and their stories didn’t come across that well to me. In the hands of a better director and writers, this could have been a good survival tale.

1 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen