We’ve waited over a year now for the eagerly-anticipated sequel to the chilling apocalyptic thriller A Quiet Place and it’s now so close we can almost feel the encroaching terror. If you still can’t wait though, you might be tempted to take a punt on Forget Everything And Run (FEAR, geddit?) to tide you over, a film that wants to be AQP so hard it almost physically hurts to watch it going through its rather sluggish motions.
The whole scenario is eye-rollingly familiar. End of the world, zombies, grubby civvies struggling to survive in a hostile environment. Bingo. Forget Everything And Run has very few unique selling points and, in truth, not a great deal to recommend it. An undoubtedly low budget necessitates an introductory voiceover that sets the scene, such as it is; the world has been struck by a deadly virus and in a sealed-off environment survivors fight to stay alive ‘hiding… scavenging… clinging to hope’. Not much hope of anything especially interesting here though, despite a visually-attractive snowscape setting and an opening sequence in which a drooling zombie lunatic attacks Ethan (co-director and co-writer Jason Tobias) and his young son Josh (Danny Ruiz). The pair return home and we discover that the family – including mother figure Joe (Marci Miller) – are protecting an infected teenage daughter who is strapped to a bed and on life support, the family wating for access to a rumoured cure. Inevitably their sanctuary is attacked by a handful of tooled-up marauders and an impasse between the groups sees Joe keeping the invaders’ sneering matriarch figure Desiree (Susan Moore Harmon) at bay while Josh and Desiree’s murderous brother head off to collect medicine and fuel from the invaders’ camp.
Sadly, nothing much of any consequence or excitement ensues. Bereft of hideous aliens or even zombies (who appear to have been forgotten until the last couple of scenes) we’re just left with a fairly mundane and visually-drab story of a couple of small groups of people shouting at each other and being a bit violent occasionally. The pace sags horribly in the middle of the film and the whole scenario fails to convince, presumably because the budget doesn’t really give us a chance to get any real perspective on how widespread this apocalyptic event actually is (a pathogen has been released into the water supply, apparently). The resemblance to AQP is heightened by the last couple of scenes too in a moment of self-sacrifice that carries little dramatic weight because we really don’t know much about the core characters much less care about them. With little to really recommend it beyond its stark landscape locations and some decent acting that occasionally lifts a dreary script, we can’t really recommend that you Forget Everything And Run. In fact, our advice is more likely to be WISE – Watch Instead Something Else.
Forget Everything And Run is available now on DVD and digital
