When Stephen King published The Running Man in 1982, its dystopic vision of a faraway 2025 was fairly novel: state-sanctioned violence is happening on television. It was sort of like Rollerball or Death Race 2000, with America’s poorest citizens competing for money on dangerous game shows for a braindead, bloodthirsty home audience.
Here we are in 2025 and we’ve got a new film version of The Running Man directed by Edgar Wright. Its premise perhaps isn’t so novel anymore, with the idea of televised bloodsport having shown up in RoboCop, Series 7: The Contenders, The Hunger Games, Squid Game and an earlier Running Man adaptation starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Wright knows this, so he ties the premise to recognizably contemporary themes of societal fracture and deepfake technology, and he does so with mixed results.
Our hero is desperate everyman Ben Richards, whose wife is turning tricks at the local nightclub and whose infant daughter is sick. He signs up and is accepted for The Running Man, the country’s highest rated show, in which contestants must fend for themselves while being pursued by vigilante hunters and surveilled by the public. No one has ever survived the show’s 30-day run, but hang in there long enough and your family is financially set for life.
Richards is played by Glen Powell, who has yet to find the vehicle that knows how to harness his megawatt charisma. In King’s book, a mean-spirited and hastily written paperback credited to his Richard Bachman pseudonym, Ben Richards is hateful and hopeless and all but ready to die. Powell’s take on the character is closer to King’s creation than Schwarzenegger’s unstoppable action hero, but he and Wright are perhaps too affable to commit to the book’s teeth-gnashing misanthropy.
Wright is in slam-bang crowd-pleaser mode here, and for about an hour in the middle, The Running Man works. The comedy mostly flops but the action set-pieces keep the movie humming along, and Wright’s penchant for montage and cartoony scene transitions gives the material a comic book zip. With so many visually indistinct blockbusters out there, I admire his attempts to put the camera in seemingly impossible places, including, at one point, behind the walls of rat-infested tenement.
He has also assembled a fun supporting cast, including Colman Domingo as the velvet-suited Running Man host (he’s good, but can anyone top the brilliant casting gambit of Richard Dawson in the 1987 film?), Josh Brolin as the toothy network head, and Michael Cera as a hair-trigger hermit with a particular axe to grind.
But as is the case with nearly every film Wright has made since his brilliant 2004 debut Shaun of the Dead, The Running Man is too long. It takes 130 minutes to get where it’s going, and it feels like 30 of those minutes could have been lopped off. The third act totally derails the momentum of the first two, with a damp-squib finale set on the close quarters of a private jet and an epilogue so awkward and clunky that it feels like a last-minute reshoot.
Get this movie a nastier streak and a ruthless editor, and you might’ve had something.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101” heard Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.