Looking back at the ’80s, it’s hard to comprehend now not just how big a movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger was in those days but how much he contributed to genre cinema. Beginning with 1982’s Conan the Barbarian, the decade gave him an extraordinary run, taking in action, sci-fi and even comedy, pairing with Danny DeVito for 1988’s Twins. Somehow, he managed to fit the original The Running Man in between launching the Predator franchise and crossing the Iron Curtain for the cop caper Red Heat. Schwarzenegger was certainly shrewd in his choice of directors, too, working with the likes of James Cameron, Walter Hill and John McTiernan — and if first choice Andrew Davis hadn’t been fired, in favor of safe-pair-of-hands Paul Michael Glaser (aka TV’s Dave Starsky), perhaps The Running Man would be a bit more fondly remembered than it is.
Liberally adapted from Stephen King’s novel, which he published as Richard Bachman, the original Running Man was a mild but still, for its time, effective satire on consumer culture and, like the book, eerily prefigured reality television and its ongoing race to the bottom. Paul Verhoeven — whose savagely funny RoboCop came out the same year and was picked by Schwarzenegger to direct 1990’s Total Recall — would have been a much better fit, and with this impressively muscular reboot, one senses that Edgar Wright thinks so too.
Looking back at the original, Wright’s film often seems more like a restoration project than a remake, to the extent that the director has taken a bold step away from the quaint comedy that peppers his British movies. In its place is something a little more anarchic and, at times, even quite angry, and the timing for its U.S. release couldn’t be better. Like the book, it begins in a dystopian future, in the aptly named Slumside, where fiery blue-collar worker Ben Richards (Glen Powell) is fighting for severance pay after being fired for sticking up for a colleague. Powell’s baby is sick with the flu, but health insurance costs are through the roof, and Powell simply can’t afford the rudimentary treatment the child needs.
Desperate times require desperate measures, so Richards turns to The Running Man, one of many shows run by the sinister Network corporation, a multi-tentacled organization that, ultimately, controls everything. The Network’s shows exploit the massive gulf between the haves and the have-nots (“We’ve got the cash, if you’ve got the balls”), but The Running Man, hosted by the wildly charismatic Bobby T. (Colman Domingo), is the daddy. Given a head start, contestants have to survive for 30 days, checking in every 24 hours and pursued by five armed and deadly hunters who are never short of tip-offs from the public.
Richards applies for the show — which no one has ever won — and greatly impresses producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), who tells him: “You have what it takes to go the distance. You tested off the charts.” Making the cut, however, is not enough for good ratings, and so the Network creates a fake new clickbait backstory for Richards, painting him as a deadbeat dad with a hooker for a wife. Powell knows the lie will stick and immediately vows violent retribution.
The straight-up revenge-o-matic nature of the plot, though true to the book, was somewhat predictably amped up for Arnie’s fanbase, but the best parts of Wright’s version are more subtle than that and play to Powell’s strengths as a vulnerable everyman. There are fun shades of Scorsese’s After Hours in Richards’ picaresque adventures, with a fine set of eccentrics ranging from the mild-mannered (William H. Macy) to the demented (a bouquet for Sandra Dickinson, please!), with an enjoyable cameo from Michael Cera as an underground radical who comes to Richard’s aid when the hunters get too close.
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But the key difference between Powell and Schwarzenegger doesn’t really begin to show until the ending. Wright had a similar dilemma with his last film, the stylish horror-thriller Last Night in Soho, which promised a very dark denouement but swerved it at the last moment. It’s the same with The Running Man, which, just when things are becoming explosive, brings back a supporting character to stir things up a bit, and not in an entirely successful way. This also is the point at which Wright’s very astute invocation of AI starts to become counterproductive: Themes of fake news and the use of doctored footage (introduced by the Schwarzenegger film) muddy things just when the film should be at its clearest.
To Wright’s credit, there’s no attempt to force a sequel, but The Running Man does leave two things open to question: one, does Powell really have the makings of a modern action hero (the jury’s still out), and two, is there still a way to reinvigorate audiences for this once-prevalent kind of story-led genre movie? The opening-week success of the younger-skewing Predator: Badlands offers hope, and though his film doesn’t quite go as agreeably haywire as Ari Aster’s Eddington, Wright is working in a similarly ambitious, contemporary-retro style that’s reverential without being the slightest bit nostalgic. He’s fighting the good fight, and there’s still plenty of time for someone like him to win it.
Title: The Running Man
Director: Edgar Wright
Screenwriters: Edgar Wright, Michael Bacall, from the book by Stephen King
Cast: Glen Powell, Josh Brolin, Colman Domingo, Lee Pace, Michael Cera, Emilia Jones, Daniel Ezra, William H. Macy, Katy O’Brian
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Running time: 2 hrs 13 mins
