‘The Running Man’ Review: Edgar Wright’s Mollifying Vision of Empowerment

For the second time this year, we’ve gotten an adaptation of a novel written by Stephen King under his Richard Bachman pseudonym whose premise—about an authoritarian state that uses a deadly reality competition show to spread its propaganda—feels timelier than ever. In The Running Man, a near-future U.S. in which infrastructural collapse has pushed most people well below the poverty line, the only path to prosperity for those not born into it is to be a contestant on the titular program. The prize? One billion dollars if you can survive for 30 days on the streets without being found by a team of professional assassins.

No one has ever come close to winning the game, so participation is basically a death sentence, but the promise of “consolation prize” wages to next of kin is incentive enough for Ben Richards (Glen Powell), an unemployed man desperate to save his sick daughter. Unkempt and vulgar, Ben cuts a sharp contrast with The Running Man’s host, Bobby Thompson (Colman Domingo), and showrunner, Dan Killian (Josh Brolin). The latter’s unctuous approach to encouraging enrollment in the show and ratings-minded enthusiasm for Ben’s rebelliousness hints at just how unconcerned the powers that be are about someone winning their rigged contest.

Powell is a better fit for the role than Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose daily protein intake alone should have disqualified him from playing a man driven to desperation by deprivation in Paul Michael Glaser’s 1987 adaptation of King’s novel. Physically and mentally wirier, Powell memorably channels his trademark alpha-male swagger into the cagey and defensive strategies of his powerless everyman. Ben knows that the system will chew him up no matter what he does, so the way he sees it, the least he can do is make himself as much of a nuisance as possible.

Once the game gets underway, the film cuts between Ben’s frantic attempts to stay ahead of his pursuers and members of the enthralled public, who are financially incentivized to report any sightings of the man to the hunters. That alone marks the film as Wright’s most satirical work since The World’s End. Far more than Glaser’s adaptation did, this one homes in on the queasy comedy that underlines even the novel’s most nakedly sorrowful moments.

For its first hour, the film hews closely to the source text, reflecting King’s lean, mean prose in the action, which Wright shoots with welcome coherence and verve. He even finds places to pepper in his usual references to his cinematic heroes, as in a series of Brian De Palma-esque long takes that float over the rooms of a hotel floor as Ben attempts to evade a pack of goons. As the film progresses, Wright subtly uses increasingly fragmented editing to convey Ben’s exhaustion and paranoia. No matter how frantic the pace gets, though, the spatial relationships of the various characters, namely Ben and his pursuers, remains consistently clear.

In the second half, though, the film simplistically expands on the novel to bring King’s prescient critiques more fully into line with signifiers of the Trump era. The starving masses of the book are now obese, splenetic types cut from the MAGA mold, and the dementia-addled mother of a pivotal character is here depicted as a victim of brain-rot content. Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall also make an effort to add more depth to the book’s underwritten ancillary characters, but this by and large results in expository longueurs that slow the pace of the narrative.

Most ruinous is the sentimentalized reworking of the book’s bleak ending. Few would accuse King of subtlety in his commentary, but Wright and Bacall’s triple-underlined declarations about the media and oligarchical culture only further undermine their half-assed attempt to provide a happy ending for a man who signs up for a contest knowing that the best he can hope for is to financially set up his family upon death. In flinching at the end, The Running Man ultimately becomes akin to the very thing it criticizes: a hollow, mollifying image of empowerment that distracts from the logical conclusions of its nihilistic premise.