“The Running Man” lacks the conviction or ingenuity of its source
Directed by Edgar Wright
Screenplay by Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright
Based on The Running Man by Stephen King
Starring Glen Powell, William H. Macy, Lee Pace, Michael Cera, Emilia Jones, Daniel Ezra, Jayme Lawson, Sean Hayes, Colman Domingo, and Josh Brolin
The Running Man takes place in a world of violent spectacle disguised as game shows, where contestants are humiliated, bruised, and all-around dehumanized for the sake of the higher ratings. If that sounds familiar, that’s because the original work by Stephen King is deeply unsubtle but also, for a story written in the early 80s, incredibly prescient about the paths reality TV and game shows would take as the corporations that oversaw them sought to pad their bottom lines and so bent reality to their will. It reads like God gave Stephen King a vision of Beast Games at his typewriter and made the King of Horror so angry that he broke out the pen name he specifically reserved for his angriest stories.
Adapting its story for the modern day faces one major roadblock, though: we have the internet now. King foresaw a lot, but even he couldn’t see the onslaught of influencers and social media and fascist radicalization coming. The world has moved on, themes that once played as visionary have become pat, and all Edgar Wright’s (Last Night in Soho) latest adaptation has to offer in the face of that is an unending stream of on-the-nose dialogue and TV puns.
His story hews much closer to King’s novel than the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle and finds what energy it has in its cast. Glen Powell (Twisters) plays against-type as Ben Richards, card-carrying angriest man on Earth, and gets a lot of mileage out of his character’s righteous indignation and increasing desperation. The leading man charm he’s spent the last several years honing is still on display but with more screaming meltdowns at the state of the world he inhabits. Frankly, the movie would have done well to focus more on Richards’s anger, not just for the point of difference it offers to other more heroically stoic or snarky action movie leads, but for comedy’s sake. An early scene where he reaches across Josh Brolin’s (Weapons) desk and slams his head against it provides one of the biggest laughs of the film, something that is otherwise only found in Colman Domingo’s (Drive-Away Dolls) wildly campy performance as the host of The Running Man show.
Wright’s class commentary also hews much closer to the original and plays far better than his tepid thoughts on television. His film is clear-eyed about the way TV is often used by the wealthy to stoke conflict between the poor and how any truly revolutionary sentiment won’t just be televised—it will be commodified. This latter thesis was better-delivered in Black Mirror’s “Fifteen Million Merits,” but it is no less well-observed and timely here. If it suffers, it does so from poor worldbuilding. We hear over and over that the Network is distracting people, but we’re not given a sense of what they’re distracting people from besides generic class issues. In the absence of specificity, it risks coming off as cynical pandering, an Eat-the-Rich story at a time where that sort of thing can be directly translated into critical praise and an increased box office.
Beyond the botched themes, The Running Man suffers most from its meandering tone and episodic story. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a truly baffling interlude costarring Michael Cera (The Phoenician Scheme), which plays as a sudden goofy comedy where characters monologue about hot dogs and make decisions almost explicitly because we need an action scene. It’s also, not for nothing, the moment when the movie starts stating its themes directly to camera, a habit it will not break before the credits roll. Elsewhere, Emilia Jones (Task) plays a motorist Richards takes hostage, and while it plays into the prototypical sensationalized news story of a hostage situation and is thus completely in line with the rest of the movie’s ideas, it causes the to-that-point frantic pace of the thing to screech to a halt so we can be introduced to a new character at the top of the third act.
And yet, all of these problems pale in comparison to how poorly the ending is fumbled: a welcome descent into sudden darkness that mirrors the source material before multiple consecutive fake-outs leave us with no ambiguity unilluminated and a half-assed “fight the power” message all but spelled out in glow letters onscreen. For all that talk, it lacks the courage of the original’s convictions or the convictions it briefly feints at having. It’s understandable that they couldn’t do the ending of the original story—I won’t spoil the ending to a forty-three-year-old novel here, but suffice to say, you could not in a million years adapt it in a post-9/11 world—but there were so many different directions it could have gone in, and Wright chose the most pat one. One must ask: where is the director of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End, and Baby Driver in all this? In the unremarkable action? In the confoundingly bad editing? Where was Edgar Wright in Edgar Wright’s The Running Man?
Rating: C+
The Running Man is now playing in theaters. You can watch the trailer here.
