The Running Man proves Edgar Wright can handle a big budget blockbuster, but struggles to say anything.
We shouldn’t expect every movie to “meet the moment”, as they say – some flicks are just for fun. But it’s weird that this second big screen adaptation of Stephen King‘s 1982 The Running Man, an incredibly angry and pessimistic book, should feel so tepid. Director Edgar Wright, who cut his teeth on the excellent Britcom Spaced before giving us Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, handles the action with dexterous flair, but on a thematic level, it achieves less than the 1987 version that saw Arnold Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards, pressganged into competing in the titular deadly game show and winding up a reluctant but brutally effective revolutionary figure.
That film, directed by former Starsky & Hutch star Paul Michael Glaser, is one of the cheesier Arnie vehicles of the ’80s, but the most OTT satirical sci-fi from then has aged like fine wine in some respects. Wright, along with co-screenwriter Michael Bacall, goes darker in some respects, and his film is certainly closer to the original novel, but somehow comes up with less.
So, as in the book, star Glen Powell‘s Ben Richard’s is a blacklisted union rabble-rouser rather than an ethical cop like Arnie’s take on the character. He’s trying to raise money for medicine for his sick daughter. He’s also very angry – people say that about him all the time. But we don’t get much evidence of that informed attribute, and Powell is too cornfed-handsome to really sell it.
The presence of performers like Josh Brolin as smilingly evil showrunner Killian and Colman Domingo as flamboyant host Bobby T do little to help us shoulder our way through the first act. The worldbuilding is perfunctory, the production design generic – although after decades of every dystopian movie trying to look like Blade Runner or Mad Max, it’s almost refreshing to see one that looks like nothing at all.
Things pick up once our man starts running, dodging both mercenary hunters and civilian informants who want to cash in on his death, but of course they do – Edgar Wright is consummate director of action, and there are set pieces here that absolutely rip – a raid on a flophouse where Richards is hiding out is a standout. Plus we get Michael Cera and William H. Macy turning up as downtrodden revolutionaries doing their own small part to fight the Man, and that’s a good time. But then we get to the climax, where… well, let’s just say, even more than two decades we’re not going to get the ending of the novel, in which a dying Richards crashes a plane into a building in a final act of defiance.
No, we get something lesser. And it deflates the entire exercise.
Still, not every work needs to be a strident polemic against the powers that be. But this is our third major film about revolutionary resistance this year, following One Battle After Another and The Long Walk, and the latter was also a Stephen King joint. Those two at least had the bit between their teeth. The Running Man seems like a technical exercise for Edgar Wright rather than a film he’s really invested in, and you have to wonder if a director with a bit more fire in their belly might have given us something more resonant.
The Running Man is out on VOD now.
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