Movie Review: The Running Man

By John Corrado

All of Edgar Wright’s movies, known for their kinetic, genre-bending style, have a propulsive, forward momentum to them. This makes him a good fit for The Running Man, a new adaptation of the Stephen King story that was already made into a 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger picture, which basically offers a premise of non-stop action.

If it doesn’t quite reach the heights of his previous action flicks like Hot Fuzz and Baby Driver, Wright still brings enough of his playful style to this King adaptation, which finds him squarely back in the action genre following his (extremely underrated) 2021 foray into horror with Last Night in Soho.

This new version stars Glen Powell, one of the hottest stars of the modern age, in the Schwarzenegger role. Powell is Ben Richards, a working class father in a dystopian future struggling to pay for medicine for his sick daughter. So he decides to audition for The Running Man, a Survivor-style reality show where he has to survive for thirty days while being hunted by armed “goons.” If he is caught, the hunters will kill him. If he survives, he wins a billion dollars.

Powell’s Richards finds himself caught in a game of cat and mouse that has him traversing a decaying hellscape of a city. Wright’s flair for the cinematic is matched by Powell’s own movie star charisma. The character’s survival depends on him using his ingenuity to hide, and adopt various disguises and personas, in scenes that recall his role in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man. There is also a character-within-a-character aspect to it, with the role that Ben has to play for the cameras and bloodthirsty audiences watching the reality show at home.

While The Running Man is somewhat of a one man show for Powell, Wright populates his film with recognizable faces who are given their moments. The other charismatic figure lighting up the screen is Colman Domingo, whom Wright is wise to cast as the reality show’s host. Domingo deliciously plays emcee to the violence, while Josh Brolin is the show’s sleazy, menacing producer manipulating things behind the scenes to boost ratings.

Katy O’Brian and Martin Herlihy are Ben’s fellow contestants on the show. But the biggest scene-stealer is Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World star Michael Cera, who reunites with the director to lead one of the film’s best set-pieces as an eccentric rebel leader. It’s the sequence that probably feels most in-line with Wright’s previous films, turning into a giddy riff on Home Alone.

In many ways, The Running Man does feel the least unique of Wright’s films, with most of his others (save for graphic novel adaptation Scott Pilgrim) having been originals. The momentum does fizzle out slightly by the end, and it also doesn’t push the stylistic flourishes quite as far as, say, Baby Driver, which literally cut all of its action to music. But Wright is still a director uniquely adept at crafting a memorable set-piece or delivering a solid needle drop, both of which he does here.

With an episodic plot that counts down days and finds the lead character fighting to survive from one action sequence to the next (a sort of one battle after another, if you will), The Running Man lends itself well to essentially being built around a series of chase sequences. On a slightly deeper thematic level, the story does have an anti-authoritarian bent to it. The themes about a world run by a TV syndicate, with deep fakes and media manipulation being tools used to maintain control, also feel even more relevant now than they did in the past. Go for a new Edgar Wright movie, stay for the performances and cultural commentary. It’s a fun ride.