What wins out: the wit or the wonkiness?
It’s tempting to write off The Running Man as a slapdash reheat, considering it’s based on the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle of the same name and has a ramshackle final third that reeks of studio interference. Yet with co-writer and director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, The World’s End) in the midst of the fray, this story—about a desperate father in a dystopian future who signs on to a game show where he is pursued by lethal hunters—has just enough sharp humor to make you want to overlook the Hollywood hiccups.
Those hiccups include some clunky, Arnold-style one-liners handed to Glen Powell, who, as Ben Richards, is asked to simultaneously conjure a bit of Arnold’s essence, offer his own hothead spin on the character, and turn up the star wattage that he’s been insistently shining on us since breaking out in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! It all amounts to a shaky, multiple-personality performance (and that’s not even taking into account the cringy sequences in which Richards wears disguises, Hit Man-style, including that of a blind Irish priest).
Powell fares best in a sequence where he’s far less dressed: wearing only a towel, he leaps out of a window to escape the game show’s hunters, adding an amusing level of suspense. Wright gets to exercise his considerable filmmaking chops there, as he does in a clever shot of Richards facing the camera, in the foreground, while a Running Man “wanted” video ad in the background displays his face. When Richards turns in profile, his video doppelganger slyly mimics the same action.
More politically pointed humor includes the bloodthirsty depictions of the Running Man audience members, who earn prize money by reporting the contestants to the show when they spot them on the street. (This made me think of the AI-generated videos currently on Facebook celebrating supposed ICE arrests.) The Running Man hardly counts as an invigorating opposition movie—it features a disastrous coda that obliterates any moral standing the film could have claimed—but there’s no denying it takes a few smart, satirical bites.
(11/15/2025)
