Tackling one of Stephen King’s tales penned under his Richard Bachmann pseudonym, Edgar Wright seeks to update the story with a new adaptation nearly four decades on from the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger cheesefest, where protagonist Ben Richards joins the titular “The Running Man” game show – a grotesque survival contest as dystopian as the near future within which it is set – in the hopes of obtaining freedom and overturning a corrupt, hyper-capitalist system by bringing the callous powers that be to their knees as he fights to stay alive.
Hollywood’s current himbo of choice, Glen Powell, throws himself into the role of the main protagonist with gusto, being an invested and capable action hero in his own right, albeit his inherently clean-cut appearance and energy becomes a hindrance for convincingly selling him as being sufficiently disheveled to believably convey the desperation and unpredictability synonymous with the character of Ben Richards.
The action is adequately zany to make the film stand out from other action films of late without veering into the predictability of superhero action, nestling the film somewhere inbetween the two genres in a way that is satisfyingly interesting without achieving anything sincerely memorable, the action set pieces instead feeling like fun vignettes that connect into a larger whole with varying degrees of success.
Wright plays to his humorous strengths by making the world seem gritty yet moderately whimsical and fantastical, incorporating sly references to both the 1987 adaptation in particular and the work of Stephen King in general, just as he maintains a fine balance with incorporating absurd notions of a dystopian future teetering on the edge of apocalypse in ways that are almost a little too familiar when perceived from the optic of the late-stage capitalist hellscape we are currently contending with as our reality.
Having swiftly built a reputation as a defining filmmaker in the earlier portion of his career, while Wright still approaches The Running Man with undeniable skill and a cheeky tone that remains in keeping with his past body of work, the spark of his earlier outings has been missing for some time, and The Running Man proves to be another lackluster affair in short supply of the anarchic panache once synonymous with Wright’s work.
The problem with Wright’s filmmaking in recent years is not that he is no longer able to produce entertaining films, but rather that he seems unable to recapture the kineticism that used to make his films thrilling events that instantly enshrined them into the pop culture canon as modern classics brimming with originality and flair.
Instead, Wright seems to have fallen into a less powerful niche where he manages to create films that are just good enough to pass the time, all the while leaving the viewer longing for how much better any given vision of The Running Man would have been if it was directed by the Wright of yesteryear.
Lacking in depth and richness, Wright’s The Running Man is a serviceable adaptation worth a watch; it does not take anything away from neither King’s original story nor Schwarzenegger’s hammy 80s extravaganza, but it ultimately plays the narrative too safe for its own good, resulting in the film leisurely jogging into theaters rather than entering the annals of action movie history with a jaw-dropping sprint a younger Wright would have been able to achieve with ease.
Verdict: 7 out of 10.
* * * * *
Produced by Simon Kinberg, Nira Park, Edgar Wright
Screenplay by Michael Bacall, Edgar Wright
Based on The Running Man by Stephen King
Directed by Edgar Wright
Starring Glen Powell. William H. Macy, Lee Pace,
Michael Cera, Emilia Jones, Daniel Ezra, Jayme Lawson,
Katy O’Brian, Sean Hayes, Colman Domingo, Josh Brolin
