Paramount Pictures
Edgar Wright needs an intervention.
The Cornetto trilogy and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World combined a refined genre sensibility with brilliant editing and stylistic ambition. Even when a film didn’t land completely for me, one would be a fool to deny the care and craft that went into each and every shot. Then Baby Driver felt like a measured step forward: less gimmicky, more grounded, even more thrilling and visceral action with razor sharp cinematic instincts.
The thought of that director adapting Stephen King’s The Running Man felt like an intriguing marriage of material and personality. King’s Richard Bachman cycle were dystopian novels about men who had been ejected from the social order and who were doomed from the opening page for it, but fought the good fight as they went down in flames. The combination of social satire, pulp science fiction, and suspenseful action seemed like the perfect palette cleanser after Wright’s unfocused and ill-considered Last Night in Soho.
After watching his adaptation I have to ask if Edgar Wright truly cares the way he used to.
The Running Man stars Glen Powell as Ben Richards, a man living in a totalitarian near future America run by “the Network.”
Richards was blacklisted from work for anti-government activity and when his two year old daughter Cathy gets the flu and he’s unable to afford medicine, the only way for him to make enough quick cash is to try out for “the Games.” The Network controls the population in part through a constant stream of violent game shows where down on their luck citizens wager grievous bodily harm for the chance to win big prizes.
Producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) convinces Ben to appear on the most deadly and popular game of all: The Running Man. Contestants on The Running Man must evade a team of Network hunters led by Evan McCone (Lee Pace) for thirty days to win a grand prize of 1 billion dollars. No one has ever won the grand prize because in addition to the Network Hunters, every citizen in the country is incentivized to try and kill Richards as well.
Edgar Wright, as I mentioned, feels strangely adrift here. He never knows whether he’s adapting the lethal seriousness of King’s original novel or the camp spectacle of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s deliriously fun 1987 take on the material. For years King talked about how studios wanted to make a faithful adaptation of his novel with Christopher Reeve in the lead and preserving the book’s original downbeat ending. This film wants it both ways.
The tonal mismatch really hurts star Glen Powell who feels like a movie star playing at being angry, his performance is caught between ironic detachment and a moral naturalistic style when he’s playing a desperate family man in the opening scenes. Ironically this film about a nationwide manhunt loses most of its urgency when the manhunt begins.
For a movie titled The Running Man, the pacing is ironically slow and the script is flabby. The action set pieces are technically competent, but there’s none of the spark of madness we would expect from the guy who directed the Subaru sequence in Baby Driver. This honestly feels like a mid 2000’s action film made by a studio mercenary.
The film’s attempts at satire are equally toothless. In a world of real-life reality TV insanity and constant surveillance, Wright’s “modern” take feels remarkably outdated, as if he’s merely reading headlines from thirty years ago. Also the film’s anti-capitalist concerns feel more than a little disingenuous when it’s home to the most distracting real life product placement I’ve seen in a genre film since Man of Steel. Would the old Edgar Wright have been okay hawking Bill Burr’s canned water in his dystopian action-satire?
The third act is where the wheels truly come off because the film utterly betrays the nihilistic spirit of King’s original Bachman book. What was even the point of revisiting this material if you still don’t have the guts to do it justice?
Ultimately, The Running Man is a near-total failure of vision. It puts me in the mind of films like Memoirs of an Invisible Man or After Earth where a great genre director is cashing a paycheck on safe material after one too many misfires have endangered his career. Edgar Wright needs to go back to the basics next time out because “safe projects” like The Running Man will be the death of him.
Extras are plentiful with audio commentary, featurettes, in-World Commercials, deleted and extended scenes, and trailers/digital spots.
