As parents, there’s almost nothing we won’t do for the betterment of our children. We’ll work 2-3 jobs, we’ll drop any and everything we’re doing at a moment’s notice to help them. And god forbid if our children get sick, we’ll move heaven and earth to make sure they can get better. In Director Sky “SkyDirects” Palmer’s latest film Run Nixon takes two young parents and puts them in the worst situation as their child has a heart defect and needs surgery in order to survive, and their desperation kicks in! If you think this feels a little bit like John Q, you’d be correct to a certain point, but Run Nixon switches up the genre to turn into a cat-and-mouse urban thriller.
Dre (Lil’ Fizz) and Stacey (Sicily Cameron) were raised in the system. Dre was once in a gang, but got out of the life to work for a tow truck company and Stacey works at a local strip club. The two raise their child Nixon (Emperor Kaioyus) in their neighborhood and while life is tough, it is a good life for that family. That all changes when Nixon passes out during a school basketball game. Once they get to the hospital, they learn that Nixon had a heart attack and is only being kept alive by machines until he can get a new heart.
Of course, insurance doesn’t cover such an expensive surgery. Meanwhile, at the strip club where Stacey works, she finds out that there’s a big bag full of cash at the strip club that the owner has to “hold” for a local gangster Slice (Jordan Lee Brown) to avoid the police catching when he gets arrested. Early in the morning, Stacey steals the cash, and then lies and tells Dre that the insurance company ended up covering the surgery. Two years later, Nixon is alive and well with a new heart, and Dre and Stacy are happy everything’s great… until Slice leaves prison.
Slice quickly deduces who stole his money and sets a plan of getting his money back. After all, he has to pay his boss ironically named “King Pin” (Wavyy Jonez) that money or his life is in jeopardy. So Slice opts to kidnap Nixon and demand that Dre and Stacey pay back the money or Nixon is going to die. The last two acts of Run Nixon turn into a cat-and-mouse game of Dre trying to find Nixon and Slice trying to get his money by any means necessary. It’s a race against the clock for Slice to get his money, and for Dre and Stacey to get Nixon back.
Unfortunately, Run Nixon is plagued by the script, the acting (oh gosh the acting at times is “Tubi” level good/bad), the choppy editing, and poor VFX. Also, the title doesn’t make any sense! Also, for an R-rated movie that takes place in “Sin City” Las Vegas, with multiple scenes at an active strip club, there is no nudity, and the two sex scenes in the film are almost muted, it’s almost like this film was made to be on BET and not in theaters. Now we don’t need this to have Game of Thrones level of sex/nudity, but let’s be consistent with the how the correct tone of Run Nixon should be. Now this is SkyDirects’s directorial debut, but apparently, he has a pretty big following for the content he creates, so we can give him the benefit of the doubt that his next film will have a tighter structure and deliver better performances from the cast, but regrettably, it did not work well in Run Nixon. The final act’s showdown wasn’t a good payoff as expected, and the final shot is eye-roll-inducing as it teases the inevitable sequel. Perhaps SkyDirects could have had a little bit of oversight to help produce a better final product and the film would have worked out a little stronger.
Run Nixon is currently available in select theaters.
