YMMV / Run Hide Fight

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• Americans Hate Tingle: The movie received generally negative reviews at the Venice International Film Festival where it premiered, but no one hated the movie more than the Italian audiences there. While the issue of school shootings is almost non-existent in Italy, their dislike for the movie more came from the quality stand-point than the subject matter. Plus, the Americentric nature of the school shootings may be the reason why it didn't get theatrical screenings in different countries.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: A "Die Hard In a School" action film that directly evoked the imagery of real-life school shootings was always going to be a touchy subject, especially since it uses a school shooting (among the most common arguments for gun control by advocates) to push a pro-gun argument. Needless to say, outside of a very small target audience who agrees with its message, the movie was not well received by general audiences.
• Critical Dissonance: Professional critics lambasted the film, with a 44% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 13 on Metacritic, with many finding it to be a tasteless Exploitation Film. Audiences were far more supportive, giving it a 93% Audience Tomatometer. At least part of this, though, may have been who it was marketed towards.
• Director Displacement: Since his company distributed the film, some assume Ben Shapiro either directed, wrote, or produced it. He had no role in its creation; it was already finished when the company that produced it imploded due to an unrelated scandal, and he simply picked it up for distribution.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: It seems like The Daily Wire tried to invoke this by purchasing the film's distribution rights and using the negative reputation it earned in Venice to promote their new streaming service.
• Spiritual Adaptation: An unabashedly pulpy "Die Hard" on an X movie about a school shooting, in which the protagonist is a student who fights back against a gang of four nihilistic, antisocial classmates who represent contemporary teen delinquent stereotypes, all while the police outside do nothing to stop them? For Newgrounds fans, barring the gender-flipped protagonist, this is about as close as anybody is ever going to get to making Pico's School: The Movie.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: This video by José argues that, for all of its producers' talk of making a film about mass shootings that focused on the victims rather than the killers, most of the victims are little more than extras or minor roles, with the only characters who get much development or focus being the heroine Zoe... and the killers, especially Tristan, who is framed in a manner similar to the Joker and given ample opportunity to spew his nihilistic, antisocial worldview. He compares it unfavorably to Elephant (2003), where the focus on Character Development for most of the film made the shooting that we all know is coming that much more tragic, as we had gotten the opportunity to care about the victims as people. In particular, he felt that Zoe was a one-note Action Girl, and that her brutality towards the killers over the course of the film, which could've been used to paint a portrait of somebody who'd been left emotionally scarred by the shooting and her past trauma, instead made her look like a psychopath with how uncritically it was presented.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: While reviews were generally negative, even critics who didn't like the film generally liked the cast, especially Isabel May as Zoe, who David Ehrlich of Indiewire (who otherwise gave the movie one of its most scathing reviews) said was worthy of better roles and a better agent.

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