Edgar Wright’s latest lacks his usual sense of style, verve, and wit
Back in 1987, Arnold Schwarzenegger headed a camp, over the top, action romp adaptation of Stephen King’s The Running Man. A book originally penned in 1982, but set in 2025. Now in the year of it’s setting, Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) gets to make his pitch for a dystopian view of the future where corporations and blood-letting competitions have sway over the masses. An effort that hews more closely to the source material, but has trouble setting itself apart from current day social strife.
Glen Powell plays our everyman Ben Richards, although an extended sequence of him in a towel hardly paints a picture of an impoverished individual. He’s blacklisted from employment after his moral fortitude outweighed corporate obligations and profit lines. Down an income, and with his wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) overworked at her bar job, it’s the worst time for their young daughter to get sick.
Unable to afford to get her access to the medical care she needs, Ben takes desperate steps, signing up with The Network, a corporate conglomerate that controls the media, while also pulling the strings of puppet politicians that make up the government, while keeping the public pacified through a slate of lethal game shows. Hoping to try and win some quick cash through one of their many shows, Richard’s aptitude, physical abilities, and simmering anger at the world around him mark him as a standout to executive Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), who sees him as a surefire ratings winner for his flagship show, The Running Man. Alongside two other contestants, Richards is released into the city of Boston (the new capitol), with 5 death-dealing hunters hot on his tail as he looks to survive. Each day he does, he banks some cash. If he lasts thirty, then he will be freed and his winnings will do more than help his daughter, it would catapult him into the wealthiest top 1% of the population. The only problem is that every camera in the nation is looking for him, every screen is showing his image, and every member of the public is guaranteed a reward for information that leads to his death.
Wright’s script, co-written with Michael Bacall (21 Jump Street, Project X), imagines a society squeezed dry by corporate greed, a world where the rich get richer by turning human suffering into entertainment. Incentivizing participation, revving up viewers and skewing their perception of contestants as scum and miscreants. The reality is that everyone watching is just a stroke of misfortune away from being in similarly dire situation, but the showy distraction keeps their eyes off the real people responsible for the bleeding of the common folk. Sound familiar?
It’s “bread and circuses” for the digital age, though ironically, the film’s vision of a dystopia still obsessed with scheduled primetime TV feels oddly quaint. We are in an age dominated by cell phones and social media, always connected devices that wire us in to current events as they happen and yet they feel poorly integrated here. The Running Man feels committed to an age at hand rather than one that lies ahead. Its commentary, about media manipulation, corporate control, and the spectacle of pain, is all too recognizable, to the point of losing its bite. It’s not that Wright’s film lacks ideas, but rather that it’s afraid to run too far ahead of where we already are.
A bright spot is the cast. Powell is as charismatic as ever, despite a script that bends over backwards to make him unlikeable. Colman Domingo injects much needed charisma as the flamboyant show host Bobby T, while Brolin gurns his way thorough proceedings with aplomb. Katy O’Brian is thrilling, making the most of minimal screentime, as does Michael Cera as a zine-peddling conspiracy theorist, whose appearance feels like the one time a little frivolity really creeps in. Lee Pace is wasted behind a mask as the leader of the hunters, a bizarrely underdeveloped and indistinguishable bunch. By the time Emilia Jones’ character Amelia arrives to offer a counterpoint to rebellion and growing public perception, the film has entirely lost its stride.
Visually, The Running Man at least looks the part. Cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon paints a world of rotting infrastructure and faintly glowing tech, a society patched together with neon and despair. Drones hum overhead, AI surveillance tightens the net, and yet the sense of “future shock” never arrives. When Richards quips about how fast a fake video of him is generated, the line lands flat, not because it’s untrue, but because deepfakes are already yesterday’s news. That’s emblematic of the film as a whole, the satire feels timid. Wright seems cautious, unwilling to deliver the sharp elbows his premise demands. His trademark energy, those whip-pans, kinetic edits, and ironic needle drops, are dialed way down. The result is a film that feels to be built from talking points rather than inspired paranoia.
For a movie about deadly games, The Running Man is surprisingly short on thrills. The action sequences are competently staged but rarely exhilarating. A hostel shootout briefly recalls Wright’s old verve, as does a casino-based shootout. Otherwise the pacing is stuck in a loop of run-hide-repeat. For all its talk of revolution and rage, Wright’s Running Man feels lethargic and staid, something all the more disappointing given his status as one of the UK’s most kinetic filmmakers.
There’s a bitter irony to The Running Man arriving in 2025. King’s novel imagined a future of media distortion and corporate rot. We’re living that reality now, and Wright’s version feels like it knows it, but doesn’t quite know what to add. It’s too faithful to its source and too timid to its moment, stuck between past and present, afraid to leap into the unknown. Wright is clearly trying to tap into an angry zeitgeist, but most of us are already tapped out, especially for a message movie that’s neither shocking enough to outrage nor entertaining enough to delight.
The Running Man ambles into theaters on November 14th
