It doesn’t take a lot to get me on board for a movie. Well, that’s not true; there are certain specific phrases that will get me interested in a film. To name just a few, you could say “starring Mark Duplass” or “directed by Rian Johnson” or “elaborate heist” and I’m immediately interested in what comes after. And there’s another name that triggers the same response. Edgar Wright. If you read my post on Last Night in Soho, you’ll already know how highly I regard the director of icons like Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, and Baby Driver (though the less said about some casting decisions the better). So when I heard he was teaming up with actor-I-have-a-soft-spot-for Glen Powell (Hit Man, Twisters) to do a new version of Stephen King’s The Running Man, I was ready for it, even though I’d never read the book nor seen the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film of the same name.
He’s quick to anger. And by quick to anger I mean he’d punch his reflection in the mirror for looking at him; Ben Richards has absolutely no chill. His daughter is sick and he and his wife can’t afford medication anymore because he lost his job and has been blacklisted for talking to union reps about radiation exposure. Right off the bat, we see a world where workers have no rights and where a reality TV landscape in which humiliation is the only currency rules the airwaves. Humiliation and one other thing. Ben sits at home trying to care for his baby daughter Cathy and watches a trivia show where a man runs in a giant hamster wheel until it kills him. The only thing the poor have to offer other than their humiliation, is their death. Let’s get into The Running Man, currently streaming exclusively on Paramount+, a lighthearted romp through nostalgia where life has no value unless you’re super rich and an entertaining death is all the poor are valued for. Can you imagine living in a world where the poor are dehumanized and looked at as expendable fodder for the rich? Terrifying. I’m so glad to live in a world where we value people for their inherent humanity and not for how much money they have.
Ben’s wife Sheila, played by Jayme Lawson (Sinners, The Batman), returns home with black market meds for Cathy because that’s all they can afford. Sheila is a waitress at a club and in the process of discussing their problems, she mentions the idea of taking an overnight shift. Her clientele is the wealthy, and while as a waitress, she’s not the main show at the club, there’s no end to the entitlement of the men Ben refers to as savages and fears for her life. Because even though she could make an entire $20 in one shift, she wouldn’t be the first waitress to work that shift and end up as an unsolved murder. Can you imagine living in a world where women can be assaulted or killed at the hands of powerful men with no consequences to them? Thank goodness this is fiction and not the real world. Ben’s only choice is to go to the television studio and try to get on one of the game shows. Anything but “The Running Man”. He’s got a mind for trivia; he’d probably be pretty good at a less deadly game show, but with his background, at the end of the assessment, he was only ever going to end up on one show. All this happens about 9 minutes into the movie, blink and you’ll miss it. The Running Man certainly isn’t hanging around.
As Ben goes for his assessment the mantra of this world in which he lives becomes painfully clear. Eyes forward, mouth closed, no sitting, no lying down. No rest, no conversation. No support from one another. I mean it. A man collapses in line after spitting up blood and when Ben tries to help him, the officers stop him and say loudly for everyone to hear “No helping” and they stop Ben from helping him with violence. That’s right. In this world, armed police will stop a citizen from helping another person who is lying on the street bleeding to death. Can you imagine.
If you’re not familiar, “The Running Man” is the most popular show in this version of the United States, where the rules are easy. They give you and two others a snazzy red jumpsuit and you just have to last 30 days to get a billion new dollars. Considering Sheila was willing to put her life on the line for 20 bucks, a billion seems like it’s an even bigger deal than it is in our world. That’s never want for anything money, not just for you and your family, that’s your entire bloodline generations to come covered. The only catch is that there’s a cash prize for the person who gives the tip that leads to your death at the hands of an elite squad of hunters. It leads to this paranoid, high intensity game of Survivor (Jeff Probst could never) where any person who recognizes you could make the phone call that leads to your imminent death. But, if Ben can survive even a week, he’d have earned enough money to get his wife and daughter out of the slums. The action that follows is kinetic, Edgar Wright utilizing drone shots to impart his style on the film in a way that adds to the visual storytelling. The hunt and the kill is part of the show, so the cameras in the show are drones, so we get diegetic drone shots. It fits. It’s all televised mayhem and misery, with the callous disregard for any form of innocent life getting huge ratings as families gather around TV the way they used to.
While the action doesn’t reach the stylishly fun levels of Baby Driver, there’s a lot to delight in the action sequences and they lighten the tone of the otherwise very bleak and angry film. That’s all done very well. But where we do run into some problems is the comedy in the film. There are some moments where I’m not sure if the violence is supposed to be over the top for comic effect or over the top to shock you into disbelief. Some of the jokes work, with Michael Cera (Arrested Development, The Phoenician Scheme) providing a great deal of angsty comic relief as a member of the underground who helps Ben. But when it comes, it always seems to be flanked by the tragic realities of their world and ours. You could get whiplash trying to keep up with the tonal shifts.
Now, if I’ve been unsubtle in my sarcasm thus far, that’s how the movie is. Everything about it is over the top and it really feels like it’s on purpose. There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s do the hits.
Colman Domingo’s (Sing Sing, The Four Seasons) performance as Bobby T, the extremely Billy Dee-coded host of the show, is a pure showman and Domingo eats up every frame he’s in. His amoral, everything for the ratings approach is as entertaining as it is detestable, but for sure you can’t look away. Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men, Avengers: Endgame) does an acceptably generic and intimidating job as Dan Killian, the evil network executive who is an expert gaslighter and is so talented at making people think he’s on their side. Emilia Jones (CODA, Task) is in it also, but while her character is pivotal to the story, her role feels so small and rushed, there wasn’t much for her to do. I’m glad she’s having a moment because she deserves it, but I hope this leads to meatier roles. Lee Pace, who remains for me the most “Oh, that’s who Lee Pace is” actor in Hollywood, was also in it as the masked head of the hunters Evan McCone. The top dog hunter, he wants nothing more than to find and kill Ben, and like Brolin, he’s sufficiently intimidating as a literal faceless evil relentlessly hunting human beings.
And then there’s Glen Powell; playing against type, he swaps the likable confidently cocky for no good reason guy out for the likable angry at everything all the tim guy. It’s Powell’s first attempt at playing a serious action hero and, frankly, I’m tired of pretending that he’s not a star. While I’ve always been a fan of Powell, this isn’t the first time his acting has shown range; his performance in 2022’s Devotion should have been his star vehicle—and his costar’s, but he went and ruined that by being a horrible person. Powell’s rage isn’t always convincing, but it’s always earnest. There’s this vein of righteous anger that runs through him that makes it work; he’s otherwise unhinged, but he rarely directs that anger at people who don’t deserve it and he’s always the first person to put himself on the line for others, even at his own detriment (peep the blacklisting for trying to protect his workers from radiation exposure). Give me more Glen Powell, make it happen. Just not Twister 3, please. That particular well has spun itself dry.
The Running Man tries to do a lot. It wants desperately to be a pointed social commentary with a dystopian future that feels far too much like today and it wants to be a light action-comedy at the same time. Unfortunately, that leads to a very uneven movie. It’s incredibly heavy-handed and over-the-top and implausible as well. I’d call it good fun if it weren’t so relevant. And I understand why it’s so heavy-handed, though. The world has lost the ability to read subtlety anymore. That’s why a show as unsubtle as The Boys still had fans who took four seasons to realize the guy who kills children is the bad guy. Maybe this movie isn’t heavy-handed at all, but rather written in conversation with audiences that seem to be missing the point at ever more alarming rates. You know I don’t like when filmmakers don’t trust the audience, that’s one of my big things that bother me, but in this case, I feel like there was a worry that if the movie were more subtle, there would be those in the audience that don’t realize that the murderous authoritarians who foster so much poverty and misery that people have to wait in lines that stretch around the block to get basic medicine at the pharmacy are the bad guys. A worry that the world in The Running Man will be taken as an ideal and not a cautionary tale. After all, the original novel is set in 2025. But while Wright can usually balance tone and impact very well, The Running Man can’t quite reconcile what kind of movie it wants to be.
There’s that feeling when you’re watching baseball, which I haven’t done in many years but this still looms large in my mind, when a batter hits a fastball on the sweet spot. All that work, years of training, hours and hours of conditioning, practice, practice, practice, and it all culminates in a crack that cuts through the air and tells your ears that a home run has just been hit before the ball ever crests over the fence. Movies have that crack too; it used to be a round of applause when you’d go to the movie theaters, those moments when we, as a crowd, stood together and applauded a screen bathed in the light of a projector for the work a cast and crew did long before and far away. Now it’s different. It’s not the sound of applause or the crack of a Louisville Slugger, no; now sitting at home, watching a movie on a streaming service, it’s the sharp breath in that you hold. That’s how you know a movie hit the sweet spot before the credits ever roll. Edgar Wright is usually a master of this. But this time, The Running Man just fell short of the outfield wall.
Despite all this great action fun, there was a feeling that stuck like a thorn in my side as I watched this. No, it wasn’t that it’s so over the top as to lack the subtlety that I crave in a film. That is true, but for as much as I am a proponent of of filmmakers trusting their audience, I think this was an example of a filmmaker basing the movie around the idea that current audiences are unfortunately untrustworthy. And it hit me. This is a fun action movie. But for a dystopian future, it’s a little too close to now. We watch people shot dead on TV and argue about it on the internet. People can’t afford medication for their children and diseases that were a non-issue for years are suddenly killing people again. We are being fed AI slop and forgetting that slop is what you feed a pig before slaughter. Wright doesn’t trust the audience because the audience is the lesson. The people gathering their families around a TV that watches them back to see just how many people are going to be murdered on their favorite reality show can so easily become us. We’re already becoming numb to watching murders unfold in front of our eyes and then arguing over whether it was justified or not. With how much this movie reflected our society, as much as it was the mirror art is supposed to be, ultimately, what I saw in the mirror was just a little bit too tasteless for me to lose myself in the fun of The Running Man.
At times, the fun felt pointless because it didn’t change the reality around the movie, nor the reality around me. It’s not Edgar Wright’s fault that his mirror is reflecting what it’s reflecting; it’s ours. It’s our society that has become so disappointing; surrounded by technology, but dictated by primitive ideas that drag us further and further away from a truly modern society. It’s a tough balancing act and I’m not entirely sure how he could have fixed it. From what I’ve read, Wright’s version sits between the camp of the 1987 film version and the serious bleakness of King’s novel. And perhaps that’s why it just fell short of being great. The Running Man is a bit too long at 2 hours, 13 minutes, with some pacing issues, but I enjoyed this movie; I was affected by it emotionally, I will continue to go on record that I was saying that Glen Powell was going to be a star back when I saw him on Scream Queens, and The Running Man is definitely a movie I will watch again just for myself, but it either needed to be a little less fun or a little more over the top to breach that upper limit of a B-movie. A solid, well made, enjoyable B-movie, for sure. Ambitious and with something to say, of course. Worth your time? Yes. But is it great? No. I just hope it’s not prophecy.
