After a vicious shootout with some corrupt police officers, Joey Gazelle’s (Paul Walker, “Eight Below”) boss Tommy Perello (Johnny Messner, “Tears of the Sun”) orders him to get rid of his gun so as to distance himself from gunfight. Hiding the weapon in his basement, his next door neighbor’s kid, best friends with Gazelle’s son Nicky (newcomer Alex Neuberger), Oleg (Cameron Bright, “Birth”) finds the gun and uses it to shoot his wife-beating father Anzor (Karel Roden, “The Bourne Supremacy”) in the shoulder.

Disappearing into the night, Oleg enters a nightmarish New Jersey dreamscape unlike anything he’s ever known. Tracking him every step of the way is Joey, secure in the knowledge that if he doesn’t find the kid and the gun Tommy and his gangland father (Arthur Nascarella, “In the Cut”) will make sure both of them are silenced forever. But things spiral out of control, the cop (Chazz Paminteri, “Bullets Over Broadway”) responsible for the earlier slayings and a Russian mobster (John Noble, “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy) related to Anzor also looking for the kid and the gun. It’s a race against time, and the deeper Joey descends into the rabbit hole the more likely it is he’s not going to be able to climb back out alive.

My goodness is “Running Scared” (no relation to the Billy Crystal/Gregory Hines 1986 action-comedy) an out of control motion picture. Wayne Kramer’s gritty and subversive follow-up to his Oscar nominated, critically acclaimed debut “The Cooler” is a down and dirty neo-noir that’s so energetically kinetic and bombastically brutal it instantaneously becomes 2006’s first love-it-or-hate-it masterwork. Make no bones about it (and don’t let the hackneyed trailers fool you) this is not your typical cops and robbers action adventure. What starts out as a Tony Scott/Quentin Tarantino melodramatic crime hybrid quickly morphs into something else entirely. It is “Alice in Wonderland” on acid, “Pont Blank” with a shot of tequila, “Get Carter” with six fists flying in youthful nihilistic abandon.

Let me be clear. I’m not saying I liked “Running Scared” from the get-go or for all the way through, start to finish, but I did like it all the same. Once I got inside its twisted go-for-broke head, and once the stunningly bravura nature of Kramer’s filmmaking washed over me, I couldn’t help but be impressed. Other than a stunningly awful unearned denouement, Kramer has the guts to take his seriously twisted fractured fairy tale to the very end of its deprived blood-splattered gravel thoroughfare. Along the way each milepost becomes a signifier to the dangers lurking within every shadow, each traffic light a neon sign merrily signally disaster for Joey and Oleg.

This isn’t an actor’s movie, which is probably a good thing because Walker isn’t exactly Michael Caine or Lee Marvin. Heck, he’s not even Bruce Willis, and while his fast and furious (you know I had to get that one in) performance sure as heck contains a lot of sweating (and even more four-letter swearing) it doesn’t exactly add up to much more than something akin to being a bit better than you’d expect from the actor. As for Bright, while I’d love it if he’d stop playing the eerily bizarre adult-like children, he’s still awfully good at it, a sequence in a bathroom where he’s calling Joey’s wife (a surprisingly multifaceted Vera Farmiga, “Down to the Bone”) for help escaping from sunny-faced pedophiles downright chilling in its authenticity.

There really isn’t too much else to say. Some will find Kramer’s cocktail repulsive (a third act beating on a psychedelic ice rink is particularly difficult to stomach) while others will eat the whole thing up with the proverbial spoon. Either way, once the shock of having the usual genre expectations blown completely out of the water subsides, it’s impossible not to grudgingly admit “Running Scared” is an expertly crafted enterprise in existential terror running on all cylinders from almost start to finish. Stunningly photographed by James Whitaker (the forthcoming “Thank You for Smoking”) and edited by Arthur Coburn (“Spider-Man”), the film screams quality (especially the wildly imaginative end credits) in each and every frame.

Whether that translates into box office receipts is anybody’s guess. Personally, I dug “Running Scared,” got into its crazy, anything-goes, devil-may-care dynamic. Not everyone will, however, and general audiences expecting the usual same old-same old will be severely shocked and disappointed. But that’s just fine with me. I like directors who take risks, films that are unafraid to dare viewers to look away. That’s what Kramer has delivered and I for one can’t help but applaud.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)