‘The Running Man’ Is a Total Blast ... Until It Loses Its Nerve

Although it was published in 1982, Stephen King was onto something when he set The Running Man in the year 2025. In a dystopian US divided by extreme wealth and destitution, a television network pacifies the masses with irresistibly violent game shows that promise a chance to reverse your fortunes at the risk of your life. Even setting aside the year, churning out a modern adaptation now is an easy and timely choice on every thematic front. From Squid Game to The Hunger Games, audiences show up for dystopian death game fiction, and it sure doesn’t take much to update The Running Man to meet our cultural moment. It’s a ripe text to play with, and Edgar Wright loves to play.

Glen Powell stars as Ben Richards, an honorable man with a sick kid who turns to the games as a way to earn cash for flu medicine. Wait, no health insurance and unaffordable med prices? From the jump, Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall didn’t have to twist the dial up too high on this “dystopia.” Richards aces the tryouts and is inevitably placed on the one show he promised his wife he’d avoid: “The Running Man,” in which contestants must outrun Hunters for 30 days. Each day they survive, they earn money. Each goon they kill gets them a bonus. Only they’re not just running from the Hunters - they’re hiding from the entire population of the US, who can call in sightings of the runners for desperately needed cash. No one has ever made it to day 30 to win the grand prize, but Richards at least has a shot at making it long enough to give his family a good life. Right?

The fact that Powell somehow has “everyman” charm in an Adonis package mostly works for Richards, a man the Network - under producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) - decides is just the star they need for their show. The character’s rage at his situation and the institutions that put him there, an anger that is essential to the plot, falls just outside Powell’s range, though his laughably blunt outbursts can’t derail the propulsive pace for long. Brolin fares far better, his calculating menace lurking behind ludicrous veneers, and Colman Domingo as the show’s host, Bobby T, is fantastic, a preening ringmaster for this bloody circus. However, the decision to hide Lee Pace under a full face mask for his role as McCone, the leader of the Hunters, is a personal tragedy I’m still healing from. I’ll leave it at that.

Katy O’Brian and Please Don’t Destroy’s Martin Herlihy are fun as Richard’s fellow contestants on the show, and Michael Cera nearly steals the movie as a revolutionary in Derry, Maine who shelters Richards in his booby-trapped house. Between that and one memorable escape where Powell rappels down a building in very small towel, the movie shows hints of Wright’s comedy roots, though it never lingers long enough for anything to grow beyond mildly amusing. The pace is relentless, and yet you still feel the 2 hours + runtime, like no matter how fast the movie sprints, it’s still a marathon.

Unlike the 1987 adaptation starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Wright and Bacall largely take their cues from the source material, following King’s plot beats with plenty of embellishments. Here, the Network is more than just a television behemoth - it is an arm of the State, with tendrils in everything from utilities to the mail service. What King understood then - and what Wright leans even harder into now - is the unreliability of “reality” media and the ability of those in power to obfuscate the truth and tailor the narrative to suit their own interests. Killian uses AI to get the dialogue he wants onscreen, even as he admits he needs real human unpredictability to spark the show. This dystopia is coyly retro-futuristic, set in an unspecified year that is only a few steps ahead of ours now, but with enough technological throwbacks to act as a smokescreen. Contestants still have to mail in videotapes of themselves daily, even if the mailboxes are flying drones. The cars are all self-driving, but the revolutionaries staple their manifestos together into simple zines to distribute. The biggest departure is the climax, which is understandable (the book’s ending, with Richards flying a plane into the Network building, would be hard to swallow in a post-9/11 world). What they come up with instead trades Richards’ revenge for that of the masses, and it’s clear most of their embellishments along the way are in service of this new ending.

The script relies on our uncomfortable familiarity with scarcity and totalitarianism to fill in the gaps in the world-building, so it can get back to being a slick and stylish ride. And it works! It’s an entertaining diversion! But rather than being a smart or clever adaptation, it settles for just being cheeky, winking at its themes in broad strokes and letting us connect the dots. It’s a balanced, safe approach that, like the ending, could feel like a cop out. Not because it’s unearned, but because after doing so much of the heavy lifting reflecting our world onto The Running Man, it’s hard to buy an ending that wraps things up with too neat a bow.