Broadcast Bloodsport: ‘The Running Man’ Reloaded

Hunt him down!

Human pathos takes a walk in The Running Man, a high-octane adaptation of the Stephen King story that prefers bombastic quick-draw action set pieces and low-hanging zingers about unfettered capitalist greed to the heavy lifting of actual character development or deep social criticism. Do you really think Hollywood billionaire-edgelord David Ellison would let his new studio bauble Paramount release anything different? This condemnation of corporatized societal oppression and their 21st century bread-and-circus coliseum antics bears its gritted teeth but never really bites.

The Running Man ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Edgar Wright
Written by: Michael Bacall, Edgar Wright
Starring: Glen Powell, William H. Macy, Lee Pace, Michael Cera, Emilia Jones, Daniel Ezra, Jayme Lawson, Sean Hayes, Colman Domingo, Josh Brolin
Running time: 133 mins

To his credit, writer-director Edgar Wright still crafts a cheeky film that hews more closely than Paul Michael Glaser’s 1987 version to the novel’s gritty dystopian plotting — one in which broke Ben Richards (Glen Powell), a fired construction worker with anger management issues, desperately signs up for a deadly reality TV show to pay for his sick daughter’s medicine, provide for his strip-club cocktail waitress wife (Jayme Lawson), and hopefully never worry about money ever again.

The payday is $1 billion if Ben can last 30 days and survive the assassins trying to kill him. The Network, of course, has no intention of paying that, so it keeps gaming the system to goose the ratings and ensure Ben has no chance of going the distance. Then again, the more the Network needles him, the more enraged he gets, and his fury is the fire that might just turn the tables and win over the viewers. “When the stakes go up, the shit goes down!” howls the show’s emcee Bobby T (strutting cock Coleman Domingo, welcome but wasted in a too-brief role).

This isn’t just Squid Games meets Speed, though. Wright’s grimmer tone doesn’t completely distance itself from the 1987 movie adaptation, a deliciously cheesy star vehicle for a pun-spouting (and gleefully spandexed) Arnold Schwarzenegger. The playful brit filmmaker is too good at needle drops to resist using Tom Jones’ “Keep Running” and Sly and the Family Stone’s “Underdog,” both of which lend a weirdly dissonant groove and buoyant vibe to the dark satire. He also can’t keep himself from indulging in some pretty great visual gags. The country’s $100 bills have Schwarzenegger’s face on it! Bobby T literally dances the running man!

But the script’s otherwise mostly faithful take does give more credence to the root ideas showcased in the 1982 sci-fi classic, and makes an oddly persuasive case that King is a lowkey pop-culture prophet. Beyond the fact that his novel takes place in 2025 (props to Wright for his apt timing), the iconic auteur envisioned an America where reality TV shows are the entertainment oxygen we all breathe (back in 1982, it seemed absurd; in 2025, it’s just depressingly true).

The seismic gap between rich and poor, the wide berth that networks give themselves to lie to their audiences and distort the truth in the service of goosing profits, the A.I. manipulation, the ultraviolence we’ve all become inured to — it all feels a bit too real now to be as fun as it was forty years ago. So too the references to unfettered deregulation, radiation exposure to on-site workers, 5-year-old kids with lung cancer from radioactive dust, and the always-on surveillance culture that’s become ubiquitous. William H. Macy, in a cameo as a black market dealer, even points out how old CRT television sets are a hot commodity. “These TV’s don’t watch you back,” he explains.

Genial Glen Powell never really convinces as man-of-wrath Ben, but watching him freak out at the immorality of the world does feel cathartic. “We are all being fucked by the Network!” he yells. But unlike Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in Network, his being mad as hell is meaningless to an audience that never hears his censored and distorted plea. Even better, he grabs one of the floating spherical Rover Cams that broadcast the action live to millions of spectators and screams into the lens: “Stop filming me!” Pretty good advice.