Rating 7/10
Director Edgar Wright has been a Stephen King fan since his early teens. He first discovered The Running Man as a paperback novel published under King’s pen name, Richard Bachman. When he finally did watch the 1987 Schwarzenegger film, he felt it lacked the bleak paranoia at the heart of King’s story. So Wright and screenwriter Michael Bacall set out not to remake the Schwarzenegger movie, but to give the book the interpretation it never got.
In this near-future America, society is controlled by an all-powerful media Network that distracts the public with violent reality spectacles. The most notorious is The Running Man, overseen by smug puppet-master Dan Killian (Josh Brolin). On the show, three desperate contestants are hunted for sport across the country for 30 days. Ben Richards (Glen Powell) is an out-of-work laborer with a sick daughter who reluctantly signs up when the Network promises money and safety for his family. But once inside the game, his cross-country flight from the Hunters, led by the masked McCone (Lee Pace), turns him into both a national obsession and an unlikely symbol of resistance.
America has been imagined as a totalitarian dystopia so many times in books and screenplays that you could wallpaper every building in America with the pages dedicated to its many variants. The Running Man targets familiar territory: reality-TV voyeurism, surveillance-state overreach, class stratification, widening income inequality, and the public’s appetite for ultraviolence. But the picture is so brisk and sharply assembled that it works on another level. Not as a searing satire, but as muscular, pop culture entertainment that’s genuinely fun to watch.
The Running Man is a glossy piece of entertainment, and Glen Powell is the dude who anchors this slick vehicle. But he’s almost too handsome, inherently affable, and clean-cut to play the gritty, hot-tempered, working-class man the saga demands. Powell reads more “GQ cover model” than “furious laborer beaten down by life.” Nevertheless, his family-driven motivation is emotionally affecting.
The film’s satirical tone pitches its characters and world as larger than life. Glen Powell’s performance often plays tongue-in-cheek. I found myself watching The Running Man through the same exaggerated, artificial lens Paul Verhoeven used in Starship Troopers. Richards’ teammates, Jenni Laughlin (Katy O’Brien) and Tim Jansky (Martin Herlihy), feel intentionally synthetic, while Josh Brolin brings the right mix of smarm and menace to Dan Killian. Colman Domingo steals every scene as Bobby T, a host whose manufactured warmth barely disguises the carnage he sells. Wright extends the satire with side shows like the trivia-and-treadmill “hamster wheel” program and the celebrity spoof The Americanos, whose star Amelia Williams (Emilia Jones) becomes an accidental hostage. Each detail reinforces a media world built entirely on spectacle.
Presiding over all of this is Edgar Wright, a filmmaker who knows exactly how to present a popcorn pleasure. His fingerprints are unmistakable. You can spot Wright’s greatest hits (Hot Fuzz, Baby Driver) in the filmmaking. Reuniting with Scott Pilgrim co-writer Michael Bacall, Wright delivers something faithful to the bleakness of King’s novella but still tightly paced and playful. The Running Man does not redefine the dystopian genre. Still, it offers a crowd-pleasing thriller that embraces its pulpy DNA. Wright’s rendition succeeds by understanding what it is: a glitzy chase movie. This may not be the most profound version of King’s novella, but it’s the most entertaining one.
11-18-25