Look, I’m not saying that ever since Glen Powell caught the world’s eye in Top Gun: Maverick, the puppyish Texan has been deliberately and strategically positioned by Hollywood as a successor to Tom Cruise. But if someone had been – well, it’s hard to think of a more effective means of doing so than by having him star in The Running Man, a kinetic, stylish, obviously physically and technically demanding new adaptation of Stephen King’s 1982 novel about a reality TV show with life or death stakes.
It feels like a vintage Cruise project from his Minority Report and Collateral era – an action film with a timeliness that underscores, though never overwhelms, its go-for-broke showmanship. (This version cleaves to the plot of King’s novel far more closely than the 1987 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, who makes a cameo of sorts as the face on this future American nightmare-scape’s $100 bill.)
It is directed with a bottomless supply of early Noughties flair by Edgar Wright, who was himself coming of age as a film-maker at that time, on the Channel 4 sitcom Spaced and Shaun of the Dead. But it’s perhaps Wright’s first feature to feel, in a positive way, like the work of a director for hire: every flourish and trick here isn’t in service of a singular creative vision so much as a great, rumbling excitement machine.
