Review: The Running Man

Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Director Edgar Wright's new version of "The Running Man" - which was previously adapted from the Richard Bachman, nee Stephen King, novella of the same name by Paul Michael Glaser and starred Arnold Schwarzenegger - is slightly better than his previous picture, the good-looking misfire "Last Night in Soho," but still a far cry from his best work.

Glen Powell takes over the lead duties as Ben Richards, a down-on-his-luck worker in a dystopian America who lives in a slum known as Co-Op City and can barely take care of his wife, who moonlights as stripper, and baby daughter. After he is fired for insubordination for taking on management over unsafe working conditions, he is desperate.

As a last-ditch strategy, Ben signs up to take part in "The Running Man," a violent reality show run by a corrupt, government-run TV network that provides shows in which the poor put themselves in peril for the entertainment of the city's rich denizens. In the titular program, three people - who are unfairly deemed as criminals by the network - must outrun a group of network assassins for 30 days to win the grand prize of $1 billion. Needless to say, no one has ever won it.

Network bigwig and lead villain Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) recognizes that Ben's anger - not to mention his superlative audition tapes - could be a great selling point for audiences and chooses him for the show. He and two others are set free and they make a go of it (separately) on the lam, while the networks goons chase them down.

Ben relies on an old friend (William H. Macy) and a connection with a history of a hostility against the police force (Michael Cera) to elude the goons, but he must eventually rely on his own wits to continue surviving. 

Much of Wright's early work was in the realm of parody of other genres - the popular "Shaun of the Dead" and, my personal favorite, the buddy-cop satire "Hot Fuzz" - while his work in recent years has moved to more serious fare. The action film "Baby Driver" represented a high point in his directorial work, but his recent two films - "Last Night in Soho" and this one - are missing his trademark flourishes.

Similar to many a remake, "The Running Man" was not necessary for a reboot, although paired with the recent (and better) "The Long Walk," the two Bachman books make for a dystopian double feature that feel timely in a disturbing way. 

There's a lot going on here that feels relevant - the poor struggling to get by while the opulent throw their wealth around and a public that doesn't even realize that those oppressing them are the bad guys - but the film leans more into wall-to-wall action than social commentary. All in all, this isn't a bad movie, just one that could have been more based on the source material (King's novella), the cast, and the director.