Something I’ll say for The Running Man: usually it’s annoying and pointless when a movie gets remade, but considering the original had almost no relation to Stephen King(“Richard Bachman”)’s novel, I can understand why someone might want to make a more faithful adaptation than the Schwarzenegger vehicle from 1987.
I can understand it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, and especially not in 2025. Even if The Running Man is completely new to you, in the last decades we’ve had so many variations on the concept, a few of which were legitimate cultural phenomena (The Hunger Games and especially Squid Game.) At this point, The Running Man wasn’t posed to ride the wave but paddle in its trough, and there’s no surprise that it hasn’t been able to keep its head above water.
It’d be nice, then, to say that it’s a great adaptation, has a unique spin, or is even that it’s just really fun and a great time at the movies. It would be nice to say that! But the Running Man offers no reason for its existence beyond the endemic lack of imagination in the executive class, who will dust off any old IP in the hope that it connects with the demographic the research claimed it would. I have a tremendous fondness for Edgar Wright, and I think it’s for that reason that this bummed me out so bad even after being burned by Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho.
The Running Man’s issue is that it seems to have absolutely no consistent vision, like no one really tried to think what the world of the film is and what it represents, and no willingness to hold a comprehensible political position either. It’s a strange alternate reality where they’ve got drones and self-driving cars and streetlamps smell you but runners still have to… record things to tape and post them in, for the most popular TV show ever that must be incredibly boring to watch (seriously, what do they fill the time with each night? The tedious procedural work of the hunters?) Any attempt at this being a “Verhoeven-like satire” is smashed to pieces because you can’t satirise consumerism with products like “Fun Twinks” while also having product placement all over the film. It’s unbelievably grim to imagine a director who once walked away from Marvel over creative differences giving a thumbs up after shooting the umpteenth take of a Liquid Death commercial he was going to put directly in his film. Eurgh!!!
Everything is just so flat. Glen Powell might play the world’s angriest man, able to withstand a taser out of sheer rage (wish they’d done more with that) but they don’t seem to be able to find anything to do with that, and even cut my favourite humanising factor–that he’s one of the rare people who still likes to read books–so they can jam in more of a reality TV parody that makes no sense because it just looks exactly like normal reality TV and doesn’t seem to have any jokes. His first escape is on the money, but they can’t seem to build on it, and in fact, there’s really not much action at all (concerningly, this lines up quite well with Baby Driver, which similarly runs out of steam.) Michael Cera has a bit of fun (and you know what, I liked the subversion of expectations) but Powell doesn’t even do anything in that scene and the big climax is… a small explosion on a bridge. Thrilling.
The nadir has to be the ending. I think everyone accepts that no studio is going to shoot the ending as written, and to be honest, I’m surprised that Powell’s Ben Richards still holds a woman hostage (it feels very retro, though they speedrun getting her onside so no one has to feel icky for very long.) But the decision to do what they do is so wrong-headed and unsatisfying I almost can’t believe it. This is a movie that has three (three!) separate “you thought this happened but it didn’t” fake-outs, and to end on one is such a complete collapse of the contract between audience and filmmaker you should be able to get a refund, especially because the film tries to have its cake and eat it by offering the expected payback in the coda. The lack of politics really comes to bite the film in the arse. They shed almost all of the climate change stuff from the book, and the main antagonist, despite a game performance from Josh Brolin, has none of the bite of even one of the random people they found on the street to play the billionaire spectators in Squid Game. The film also seems to forget Colman Domingo is playing a baddie, because he escapes thanks to… his contract negotiation? Was something cut earlier in the film that would have had us emotionally invest in his character?
This movie even largely fails on the “it’s nice to look at Glasgow” scale, because while I popped when I saw the back of the Savoy Centre or whatever, most of this film is slathered in so much digital smear that it might as well have been shot in the Volume. I don’t mean to bang on about haptic cinema again but Christ we really need films to look real again.
Spaced is good though, isn’t it?
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