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Edgar Wright, that unstoppable force for good in cinema, has revived the sci-fi thriller satire last seen in 1987 with Arnold Schwarzenegger; it now stars Glen Powell and is adapted directly from the original 1982 novel written by Stephen King under his “Richard Bachman” pen-name, a futurist nightmare set in that impossibly distant year of 2025. The resulting film is never anything but likable and fun – though never actually disturbing in the way that it’s surely supposed to be and the ending is fudged and anticlimactic.
Yet there’s plenty of enjoyment to be had. Wright accelerates to a sprint for some full-tilt chase sequences; there’s a nice punk aesthetic with protest ’zines being produced by underground rebels; and Wright always delivers those sugar-rush pop slams on the soundtrack, including, of course, the Spencer Davis Group’s Keep on Running. It’s a quirk of fate that The Running Man arrives in the same year as The Long Walk, also from a King book: a similar idea, only it’s walking not running.
Powell plays Ben, an honest, hardworking guy in a dystopian US run by a faceless corporation in the traditional manner. He can’t get work after being blacklisted for calling out unsafe practices but desperately needs cash to buy medicine for his sick daughter. His wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) is moreover exploited at the club where she works as a waitress-slash-hostess, although King’s original novel is clearer about the distasteful things she needs to do to earn money. In despair, Ben signs up for a top-rated reality TV show called The Running Man; he has to go on the run across the US, hunted by professional killers, and if he can survive for 30 days, he gets a billion dollars. But all too late, he realises that these shark-like fascist TV execs aren’t going to play fair.
The show’s wacky studio presenter Bobby T Thompson is played by Colman Domingo, and behind the scenes Josh Brolin is hard-faced producer Dan Killian, who has eerily white teeth. They are more or less familiar personae from the Hunger Games series, but the film alludes also to classic small-screen satires such as Sidney Lumet’s Network and specifically, I think, to Robert Redford’s Quiz Show, particularly in the early scenes in which we see all the lesser programmes that Ben could in theory go in for.
Ben realises that he is being set up all along the way, misrepresented as a bad guy, and sneakily subject to recruitment overtures to join further franchise iterations of the show if he plays along with their lies. But wait. Killian is using AI for phoney videos showing Ben declaiming ugly contempt for the public: a level of digital fabrication that King never envisioned when he wrote it. And, if they can fake all that so easily, what is the point of getting anyone to go through all that real-life running at all?
It’s an uncomfortable issue that the movie doesn’t entirely solve; as a result The Running Man sometimes feels retro-futurist and steampunky, though it is always watchable and buoyant. Wright has hit a confident stride.
