A desperate man takes part in a TV show that requires him to spend 30 days evading a team of professional assassins.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Edgar Wright
Starring: Glen Powell, Josh Brolin, Colman Domingo, William H. Macy, Lee Pace, Emilia Jones, Michael Cera, Daniel Ezra, Jayme Lawson
Arriving in the wake of the surprisingly good The Long Walk comes another adaptation of a Richard Bachman novel. As you're no doubt aware, Bachman was a pseudonym Stephen King deployed for works that tended to skew a little darker than his regular output (the darkest of all, 1977's 'Rage', will likely remain the one King novel that never makes it to the screen). Set in 2025, his 1982 Bachman novel The Running Man imagined a dystopian surveillance state America where a TV network has become so powerful it practically runs the country. The docile masses tune in to watch a variety of outlandish game shows, the most popular of which is "The Running Man", in which contestants can win a fortune if they can survive for 30 days without being killed by the hunters employed by the show.
The 1987 movie adaptation veered wildly from King's book. In that version Arnold Schwarzenegger (who makes a "cameo" here) played the hero, Ben Richards, as a political prisoner forced to become a contestant. In Edgar Wright's more faithful version Glen Powell's Richards is an ordinary joe, a husband and father who desperately needs money to pay for treatment for his sick infant son, and thus willingly becomes a running man contestant.
Both movies are bad in their own ways, but the changes made by the '87 film made more sense for a cinematic adaptation. The key diversion was reducing the time frame from 30 days to three hours. In theory this should have created more urgency, but Paul Michael Glaser's uninspired direction made it a sluggish endeavour regardless. Wright has stuck with the novel's 30 days, which removes any potential urgency and makes it more akin to something like The Fugitive. Of those 30 days, we probably see no more than five, which makes us wonder what Richards is up to for the other 25? Is he just hanging out in rooms playing solitaire? That he's able to evade the supposedly skilled hunters for so long greatly lessens the sense that he's in danger.
Wright fails to exploit the paranoia inherent in this plot. Members of the public can receive cash rewards for grassing up the contestants, but this threat is almost non-existent in Wright's narrative. Richards gets out of the city far too quickly, removing some potentially tense set-pieces in which he sees every citizen as an enemy. The hunters catch up with Richards mostly because he fails to keep moving. Wright frustratingly displays no interest in building up suspense in this regard. The hunters always appear suddenly; their arrival is continually played for a cheap shock rather than creating suspense by showing them slowly making their way towards an oblivious Richards. As Hitchcock was fond of pointing out, a shock only lasts for an instant, while suspense can keep an audience on edge for an entire movie.
Wright's strengths lie more in action, and there a couple of decently mounted sequences in this regard. The highlight is an assault on what had seemed a safe house run by an activist (Michael Cera, the film's MVP), with Wright's trademark energetic camerawork sweeping us off our feet as we race up and down the building's two floors. The influence of early Luc Besson can be seen in a similar assault on a roach-infested downtown motel.
But a couple of good action scenes can't paper over this movie's many cracks. Having Richards do all this for his family means a lot of his choices don't make any sense, as some of the decisions he makes will clearly put his wife and kid in danger. Richards is a contradictory figure here, as though two different screenwriters wrote individual adaptations of King's book and the two scripts were awkwardly mashed together. To use a Kurt Russell analogy, Wright's movie can't decide if its Richards is Snake Plissken or Jack Burton. In some scenes Powell's performance suggests he's channelling Clint Eastwood, while in others he's closer to Ryan Reynolds. The movie can't decide if Richards cares more about saving his family or exposing the lies of the network, and it struggles to find a plausible way to combine the two.
The world building is mildly interesting in its highlighting how analog technology has been embraced by the rebels in this world (old CRT TVs have been revived because "they don't watch you"), but some of its details makes little sense - why, for example, would cash still be valid in such a controlling surveillance state? The movie's shallow and patronising politics come off as hypocritical, another case of a bunch of Hollywood elites telling the plebs we should be less materialistic. This aspect reaches a nadir when Richards takes a young woman (Emilia Jones) hostage and berates her for spending her money on an expensive scarf rather than giving it to the poor. The Running Man's reported budget was $110 million.
The Running Man is in UK/ROI cinemas from November 12th.
