Stephen King wrote The Running Man in 1972 when, as he’d later describe, he was “a young man who was angry, energetic, and infatuated with the art and the craft of writing”. It imagines a reality television show in which the lower classes are violently hunted for entertainment, their narratives re-edited and manipulated in order to villainise those who dare subvert the status quo. He set it in 2025. How painfully prescient – and how poignant it should be to see it adapted for film in this year of all years.
Its hero, Ben Richards (here played by Glen Powell), signs up to take part in The Running Man after he’s blacklisted from any viable means of employment for showing a little too much solidarity with his fellow man. The film, meanwhile, is being released by Paramount, the first major studio to issue a public denouncement of the signees of a pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions implicated in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. As I said, painfully prescient.
The actual film, though – directed by Edgar Wright, and written by Wright and Michael Bacall – is a near-total failure on this front. What should, quite easily, feel like a mirror’s been smashed and its pieces methodically jammed between our ribs, feels closer to a friendly knock on the shoulder. The material’s all there, yet there’s none of the urgency.
Wright, who made his name in witty genre parodies (most famously, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz), has increasingly shifted towards more traditional Hollywood fare. In doing so, he’s lost much of that once-ironclad grasp of tone. King’s novel was previously adapted in 1987, loosely, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role of Richards. It’s deeply inelegant, but at least the satire works in its own garish way.
Here, while Wright hews more closely to the book’s original plot, all that bite has been filed down by slick manoeuvres and cutesy gags. One character delivers a call to revolution, only for the film to cut suddenly to him slurping from a can of Monster, as if the whole thing were just a fraudulent performance. There are no rough surfaces, not in the generically futuristic makeover Glasgow receives (standing in for Boston), nor in Colman Domingo’s serviceably showy host Bobby T, Josh Brolin’s network chief Dan Killian, or Lee Pace’s bandaged-head hunter, Evan McCone.
Powell, meanwhile, is the least he’s ever seemed like himself on screen, and the most like his mentor Tom Cruise. He furiously chops his arms in the same way when he runs. He frowns, squints, and when he wants to express vulnerability, lets his eyes water just a little in the same way. You get the sense he’s trying to compensate for the fact that he’s not quite the right fit for a character described as “the angriest man to ever audition” for The Running Man. Wright places a far heavier emphasis on comedic value (Richards, at one point, abseils down the side of a YMCA in nothing but a towel) than on any sense of fury or propulsion.
There’s no real purpose to all that white male rage. All Richards tells us, over and over again, is that he puts his family first. The mind drifts to how poignantly Paul Thomas Anderson dealt with the topic in One Battle After Another. But you won’t find any women active in this film’s underground revolution – at least, any who aren’t presented as an active hindrance to the cause. The Running Man does its best to ignore the timeliness of its own story. And if you’re just waiting for the punchline? Well, that doesn’t come either.
Dir: Edgar Wright. Starring: Glen Powell, William H Macy, Lee Pace, Michael Cera, Emilia Jones, Colman Domingo, Josh Brolin. Cert 15, 133 mins.
‘The Running Man’ is in cinemas from 12 November
