First published in 1982 but set in the year 2025 (ever heard of it?), Stephen King’s “The Running Man” takes place in a then-future where the world’s economy has collapsed, America has turned into a totalitarian hellhole, and the country’s media apparatus has created a free spectacle that keeps people too furious with their fellow citizens to recognize the government as their common enemy. Bachman al-Gaib!
Suffice to say, it’s more than a little on the nose that Edgar Wright’s extremely — if not unfailingly — faithful adaptation of King’s novel began production just a few hours before polls opened for the 2024 election. But the uncanny timeliness of this new take on “The Running Man” (which, like most movies, is significantly better than the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle of the same name) is better measured by its emotional complexion than by its subject matter.
While it’s become de rigueur for $100-million Hollywood movies to offer technodystopian visions of mass inequality (even those made by studios hastening to make such visions a reality), this messy but propulsive action-thriller surges with a rage that dovetails all too well with the current moment. Despite lacking some of its director’s signature wit and precision, neither of which have survived Paramount Skydance fully intact, the film is viscerally powered by the pent-up frustration of a society that always seems to be inches away from realizing its own strength.
Wright’s script, co-written with Michael Bacall, condenses that anger into the core of an increasingly fun pop confection that wouldn’t know how to take itself too seriously if it tried. The result is a semi-satirical action-thriller that strains — with lots of sweat but considerable success — to find the same harmony between its conflicting modes that its characters hope to strike between their conflicting motivations: revenge and righteousness, comfort and caring, personal grievance and social progress.
For penniless but jacked-as-hell father Ben Richards (a clenched and capable Glen Powell), who can’t afford medicine for his fluish baby girl even though he clearly ingests his own weight in protein powder every week, his struggle is between risk and reward. Fired from every job he’s ever had due to his unprofitable tendency to save his co-workers from certain death, and so pissed at the world that he carries his sick daughter around just to stop himself from assaulting the people who fucked him over, Ben can’t help but feel tempted by the chance to audition for The Network’s biggest game show: “The Running Man.”
The rules are simple: Three contestants are released into the streets of America’s cultural capital (which, in what has to be the movie’s bleakest detail, is now Boston), given a few thousand New Dollars to spend as they like, and challenged to stay alive for 30 days while they’re pursued by a quintet of masked and outlandish hunters; imagine if ICE styled themselves after the bad guys in a Hideo Kojima game, and you’ll be on the right track. To make matters worse, the equally destitute viewing public is rewarded for ratting out the runners (or killing the contestants themselves), which pits neighbor against neighbor in a way that keeps the underclass at war with itself.
In six seasons, not a single player has lived to enjoy the $1 billion New Dollar prize, which is why Ben’s wife Sheila (“Sinners” breakout Jayme Lawson) makes her well-meaning rage case of a husband promise that he won’t audition for the show. You’ll never believe what happens next. For obvious reasons that nevertheless require far more setup and nuance than Wright affords them here, Ben impulsively auditions for the show. The process is so poorly explained that the entire first act of the movie feels like it’s standing on one leg, but at least we understand why shit-eating Christof wannabe Dan Killian (Josh Brolin, his handsomeness weaponized to the hilt) lights up at the chance to put Ben in the season finale. He’s emotional, he’s motivated, and his smile is a special effect unto itself. Cinemas no longer exist in a society where freemium government broadcasts are the only viable model for mainstream entertainment, but the first rule of producing television still applies: Never pass up the chance to cast a movie star.
Be that as it may, the film’s loyalty to television feels like the only dated thing about it, even if Wright — the creator of “Spaced,” and a voracious student of pop culture — understands the nuts and bolts of the format on a much more tactile level than King ever has. King invented The Network at a time when people were still processing the toxic relationship between mass entertainment and mind control, and while the thrust of his story may not have aged a day, the medium is the message, and that medium has changed.
Applying “Squid Game” savagery to a show that operates more like “American Idol,” this new version of “The Running Man” is too enamored with its source material to more aggressively reshape its rules, and the compromises it makes toward modernization prevent it from meaningfully channeling how social media has turned the entire country into a circular firing squad. Most of the characters here are too poor to own a mobile phone, which gives the director a good excuse to steep the story in the stuff of pirate broadcasts and politically radical zines. (While it’s never specified when this take on the story is set, the whole thing is spiritually rooted in the ’80s, and as close to early John Carpenter as today’s Hollywood gets.) But that key aspect of its world-building doesn’t square with the film’s 21st-century emphasis on surveillance culture and the gamification of the panopticon.
As a result, “The Running Man” stumbles whenever Ben is at risk of being reported by his fellow citizens. The film’s eagerness to hinge so much of its plot on AI — evolving another prescient detail of King’s text into the present — creates an unavoidable tension with the outmoded production demands of Killian’s show, a tension that Brolin is asked to wave away with a single line of dialogue. The entire third act of this movie hinges on waiting for primetime so that Ben’s death might be a ratings bonanza, an anachronistic stalling device that distracts from the urgency of an explosive “sci-fi” screwball whose most effective details are defined by how closely they mirror our reality.
To that point, one of the foundational strengths of Wright’s film is its refreshingly gentle approach to aestheticizing dystopia. Abandoning the grimdark ugliness of the Schwarzenegger version, “The Running Man” goes easy on the future tech of it all, its production design answering every high-tech flourish with an even richer amount of ambient decay.
The movie’s first big setpiece, in which the hunters try to flush Ben out of the YMCA-like hostel where he’s been hiding incognito, nearly matches the manic “Tom & Jerry”-like mayhem that Wright suffused into every “Baby Driver” car chase. It’s accented with a full suite of the little grace notes that less distinguished filmmakers tend to lose amid the Hollywood machinery (look out for the flaming rats, and the grenade-packed elevator ride that feels like a callback to the pre-viz fight sequence that Wright never got to shoot for “Ant-Man”). The director falls a bit short of transcendence here (this movie is sorely missing the musicality of his previous work), but “Last Night in Soho” cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon makes the dilapidated art deco of the Boston slums look more full of life than our brief glimpses at the tony part of town. He shoots the areas outside the city limits with a vivid sense of entropy; the story is only able to move at the pace that it does because we can see for ourselves how the rich have left everyone else to rot.
Powell is every bit as charismatic as Killian hopes (and if you’re gonna make a legitimate bid to be the next Tom Cruise, it helps to make a movie where you have to run all the time), but “The Running Man” is really held together by its supporting cast, which somehow feels like an upgrade from the estimable likes of Yaphet Kotto and Jesse “The Body” Ventura. Daniel Ezra is a major standout as Bradley Throckmorton, an inner-city kid whose reggae-soundtracked bootleg channel allows the movie to smuggle a colorful blast of YouTube culture, while Katy O’Brian is a shot of “better to burn out than to fade away” joy as a “Running Man” contestant who spends her entire time on the show at casinos and strip clubs. Colman Domingo is the Ryan Seacrest we deserve as “The Running Man”‘s silver-tongued emcee. Michael Cera pops up just long enough to cosplay “Home Alone” for the Kristi Noem era (you’ll know what I mean when you see it), while Emilia Jones makes the best of a tough role as a Network-pilled young Karen. Lee Pace brings some major Revolver Ocelot menace to the part of super hunter supreme Evan McCone, even if Americans of all persuasions could probably agree that it should be illegal to hide that guy behind a mask for an entire movie.
Good, bad, or somewhere in between, the people Ben meets along the way are absolutely crucial to a film that presents class solidarity as the only effective weapon against a Network that depends upon sowing discord between its viewers. In King’s book, and to an even greater degree in the previous Hollywood adaptation of it, that Network was meant to be taken at face value. While Wright’s riff on “The Running Man” is too busy scrambling up the East coast to meaningfully reckon with how time-old TV paranoia has come true in the age of mobile phones, the movie looks beyond media satire to recognize how the people of a country obsessed with filming itself might be uniquely incapable of seeing each other clearly. Its ending might cop out of the novel’s most ghoulishly prescient detail, but that isn’t enough to completely neuter the rare Hollywood product that dares to stoke our anger rather than mollify it — that reminds us that our rage is a valuable resource worth a lot more than money, and one that we can’t afford to waste on each other.
Grade: B
Paramount Skydance will release “The Running Man” in theaters on Friday, November 14.
Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.