In a future dystopia, down-on-his-luck Ben Richards (Glen Powell) enters the deadly-assassin TV show The Running Man. Can he change a rigged game forever?
There have been plenty of dystopian reality TV game shows over the past few years, from The Hunger Games to Squid Game — but they were all predated by The Running Man. The original 1982 novel by Richard Bachman, aka Stephen King, was set in 2025, a year in which the world’s economy is in ruins and violence is rising, if you can imagine such a thing. Into this unlovely dystopia, a working stiff named Ben Richards enters the eponymous lethal TV contest where entrants have 30 days to survive being hunted down by assassins, with a vast cash prize the winner. A 1987 film adaptation starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in his beefy pomp was largely unfaithful to the novel, featuring plenty of shiny, yellow jumpsuits but very little running.
Enter Edgar Wright, now back in full Hollywood mode after previously spending a night in London (2021’s Last Night In Soho). Wright’s take, from a script co-written by the director and his Scott Pilgrim scribe Michael Bacall, retains much of King’s original source material — even down to the postable self-tapes which contestants must send in, every day of the contest. (No uploading to the Cloud here.)
It’s Wright’s biggest, boldest canvas yet…
Where this year’s other Bachman/King adaptation, The Long Walk, was gritty and contained, The Running Man is world-buildingly expansive, mixing vast dystopian cityscapes with old-school tech: cathode-ray-tube tellies and VHS cassettes populate this gleaming future. It’s a pleasingly retrofuturist approach, but it also serves a narrative purpose. “These TVs don’t watch you back,” notes William H. Macy’s underground tinkerer Molie, in a dark nod to the surveillance-state “internet of things” that King practically predicted.
The result is something akin to a Paul Verhoeven film: the ’80s urban nightmare of RoboCop crossed with the cheekily iconoclastic satire of Starship Troopers. It even has a Home Alone-esque booby-trap sequence. It’s Wright’s biggest, boldest canvas yet, and while it is less funny or flashily directed than his earlier fare, he doesn’t miss a chance to rib American popular culture or the capitalist horrors it fostered, as King once did, while also nodding to citizen journalists and social-media creators. (Special shout-out to the pitch-perfect Kardashian pisstake ‘The Americanos’.)
And in Glen Powell’s Ben Richards, Wright finds the film’s grouchy, punchy, ill-tempered heart, a man with serious anger-management issues but, crucially, one who knows how to be both strong and kind. He may not be flashing his million-dollar smile as much here, but Powell makes another strong case for his leading-man, movie-star, action-hero credentials: he is, in effect, Wright’s new Lucas Lee. You can totally see him pulling off the line, “The only thing separating me from her is the two minutes it’s gonna take to kick your ass.”
Edgar Wright’s biggest film yet feels like something out of both the future and the 1980s: a scathing satire that’s also a lot of fizzy blockbuster fun.
