Way back in 2017, director Edgar Wright floated the idea of remaking the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie The Running Man. Now, eight years later that remake is here, tweaked to be a more faithful adaptation of the original Stephen King novel (written under the pen name Richard Bachman), while still incorporating elements of the ‘80s flick. Starring Glen Powell as the man who runs, the brisk, propulsive movie is the most Wright has leaned into blockbuster Hollywood filmmaking. It’s fast, it’s fun, it’s often funny; but when it comes to the more biting satirical elements of the source material, it smooth things over enough that the crowd-pleasing film doesn’t quite pass the finish line.
The idea in all three versions of Running Man is the same: in the near future, the world has been taken over by “the network,” which has further divided the chasm between the well-off and the poor, while hooking everyone on Free-vee – not the free to stream service from Prime Video, but a non-stop flow of entertainment programs and corporate controlled news. One of those programs is The Running Man, which finds three contestants on the run for their lives for money and freedom, as they’re tracked by both the people watching the show, and Hunters, elite killers hot on their tails.
In the new version, adapting from the book, Ben Richards (Powell) is at his wits end when his two-year-old daughter falls sick with the flu. He and his wife don’t have money to get her meds, and he’s been blacklisted by every job in town for leaking info to a union head. So he decides to sign up for a game show… And ends up on The Running Man. What follows is a cat and mouse game over the course of the next two plus hours as the furious Richards tries to stay ahead of the Hunters – and particularly their leader, the masked McCone (Lee Pace).
Along the way, Richards learns a whole lot more about the truth of the world and the game thanks to allies like Bradley Throckmorton (Daniel Ezra), who is keeping track of all the ways the network fakes the game, and a very funny Michael Cera as Elton Parrakis, a rebel inventor who comes from the home of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, Derry (sadly, Pennywise is absent from the film). Richards also reluctantly becomes the spark for a revolution against the network when all he wants is to get back to his wife and kid.
Powell continues to prove his star power in this, eschewing the gentle nice-guy routine he’s played in Hit Man and Anyone But You, trading it in for coiled rage. He’s mad at the network, he’s mad at the system that seems to want his wife and kid dead, and he’s got the skills thanks to his various construction jobs to possibly go the distance. Versus the aloof, pun-slinging Schwarzenegger in the ‘80s movie, Powell is more in line with how King wrote Richards in the original novel – albeit spitting far fewer hideous racial slurs. Thankfully.
There is some softening, though… The movie takes great pains to show that despite all his rage, Richards is still just a rat in a cage. Sorry, a nice guy whose first instinct is to help other people, even though out loud he professes to only care about his own family. This definitely leans into Powell’s strengths as a traditionally handsome leading man. The Richards of the book is a pointed middle finger to society; Richards in this new version is the face of rebellion, something that works because that face is very, very pretty.
It also leads to the goofiest part of the movie, that after building an entire movie and TV show around Powell being a master of disguise – that would be Hit Man and Hulu’s Chad Powers – Running Man makes it a hat trick, throwing the actor into various outfits and accents, like Powell’s chiseled chin isn’t one of the most recognizable features on Earth. At least the movie has fun with it, including a delightful scene early in the film where a terrified Richards turns his head in time with a billboard behind him structured like a police lineup shoot.
Beyond Powell, the other standouts in the cast include Josh Brolin as the reptilian producer Dan Killian, and Colman Domingo as Running Man host Bobby Thompson. Domingo hams it up here, dancing and posing and commanding the stage. Wright has likely taken tips from Richard Dawson’s scene-chewing performance in the 1987 movie, which mashed Killian and Thompson into one host/producer character. There’s no line in this new version quite as sharp as Dawson’s off-hand delivery of “get me the President’s agent,” but Domingo, as usual, holds the screen, even without much of a character arc.
Brolin, meanwhile, is all veneered smiles and slick, tight skin, an example of everything wrong about society. He’s entertainment personified, something made clear in a late-in-the-game speech from Killian where he drives home the theme of the movie: people don’t want anger, they want to be entertained. Brolin is perfectly hatable in every frame, the devil himself, and arguably a better villain here than as the CGI purple baddie Thanos in the Avengers movies.
Cera, as mentioned, is very funny and cast against type as a revolutionary. But Wright knows how to get the most hilarious performance out of his former Scott Pilgrim star, and it ends up working swimmingly. Emilia Jones also features as Amelia Williams, a woman taken hostage by Richards. And while she doesn’t get much more to do than be “woman in trouble,” as usual she’s grounded and relatable in every scene. Also fun are Please Don’t Destroy member Martin Herlihy as Jansky, the worst Running Man contestant ever, and Katy O’Brian as the wildly unhinged contestant Laughlin. On that last: this is the second time O’Brian has co-starred with Powell (after Twisters), and out-shined him even in her scant screentime. Can we please flip her to the lead role for the next film? Thanks.
As for Wright’s direction? If he really was dreaming of making The Running Man for years… Why did he deliver something that feels less like an Edgar Wright movie than yet another slick Hollywood blockbuster? There are a few of Wright’s surprising flourishes. A car chase that occurs from Powell’s perspective while he’s locked in the trunk is interesting. Pretty much everything in Derry with Cera’s character, including a booby-trapped house that leads to the funniest line in the film, is also delightful. And a scene where Powell is cornered by the hunters while wearing nothing but a towel is inventively staged, too. The closest this comes to feeling like a Wright movie though is when Ezra’s character reveals the revolutionary tapes he’s made, which rip through the screen and break the frame.
But mostly, the action is a jumble, and often hard to follow. This is not the jaw-dropping clarity of the action scenes in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the wild propulsion of Baby Driver, or even the innovative camera work of Last Night in Soho. Instead, it’s just another movie. An enjoyable one, to be sure. But given Wright’s sporadic output over the years, and particularly with at least eight years of preparation, one would expect more of a revelation than the pleasant time at the cinemas Wright provides here.
The bigger issue is that the movie itself leans more towards Killian’s view of the world. The book is nasty and vile, presenting a dystopian view of an America – and world – where there is no tomorrow. Over the course of the novel, that Richards learns the network is knowingly polluting the air to deadly levels, and over-charging for the nose filters which could save thousands of lives. In the new movie, Richards also learns that – but once the network edits his revelation out of the broadcast, his societal awakening disappears, rather than doubling down. Richards’ motivation is always getting back his family, versus expanding his horizons to fight for something bigger than himself.
It’s curious too because the movie embraces timely topics like spiraling costs of healthcare, and images like Pace as a masked, gun-toting government stooge stalking the streets with no real oversight, or revolutionaries dressed like images of Antifa. There’s a Network-esque speech towards the end from Richards where he tells people – staring right at the movie theater audience – to turn off their TVs and look at what’s happening in the world outside. But all this is in the frame of a movie that probably costs you $20 to see, plus popcorn and soda, and ultimately is not going to drive people to cancel their Paramount+ subscriptions in protest – or at least Paramount likely hopes that isn’t the result. Despite the faux-revolutionary fervor of the film, it buys into Killian’s premise that we all have bloodlust, and all want to be entertained… And watching movies like Running Man satiates that, provides fake catharsis instead of the real revolution the world needs. It sets us up to watch the next movie, the next show, and continue to degrade our bodies and minds at the service of the corporate overlords who sit safely in their high towers while the rest of us are down here, jockeying for scraps.
Look, if you are looking for a fun time at the movie theaters, running man, don’t walking man, to go see The Running Man. The movie is a good time, despite what I just laid out there. But just know this is not the timely film it masquerades as. For more pointed commentary on the world we’re in right now, look no further than the vomit of anger King spewed on the page way back in 1982. And while the new movie doesn’t specify which year it takes place in, the book does: 2025.
The Running Man hits theaters on Friday, November 14.
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