About a day into “The Running Man” – the titular game show from Edgar Wright’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel – a contestant named Jansky (Martin Herlihy) is about to die.
Jansky is one of three contestants tasked with avoiding a murderous crew of hunters for 30 days in order to win $1 billion. Unbeknownst to him (but broadcast on network television to millions of people), the cashier he’s been hitting on for the last few minutes has reported him to the authorities. One of the other contestants, Ben Richard (Glen Powell), is watching the whole doomed affair play out on television.
Jansky is painted a fool. His attempts at flirting involve telling the cashier that there’s a guy on “The Running Man” who looks just like him, and he heard he’s kind of hot. Before the hunters take him out, his last words amount to what might as well be a raised eyebrow and shrug straight to camera. In short, it’ll all very, very silly. In contrast, Richards is all seriousness, quietly urging Jansky to run away, his rage-filled eyes pained at the sound of the gun shot that kills his competitor.
This moment is emblematic of the type of tonal clash that can be found all over “The Running Man,” a movie that’s a little too absurd for how seriously it takes itself. While Wright is a capable action filmmaker and finds the right balance in a few key moments, convoluted plotting and characterization and a third act that tanks whatever good will the film earns early on, drag “The Running Man” down.
Richards is a working class stiff, unable to keep a job and taking care of his sick daughter. He’s also got an anger problem, but one that comes from his empathy (all of his firings stem from the fact that he cares about other people). All of this – Richards’ desperation for his child, his potent sense of rage – make him an ideal candidate for “The Running Man,” at least in the eyes of the show’s producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin). I would argue he actually seems like the ideal candidate to burn it all down – which he says he wants to do, multiple times – but hey! I’m not casting this show.
Fundamentally, the premise of “The Running Man” is very goofy. That was true when King published the book in 1982. It was true back in 1987 when the original movie came out. And it’s true now. The original movie – starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and featuring a truly great performance from Richard Dawson – isn’t very good, but it at least understood its goofiness to be a feature, not a bug. In contrast, Wright’s version of “The Running Man” tries far too hard to be About Something. Instead of letting the satire that’s baked into its premise breathe, it instead takes every opportunity it gets to solemnly ram a message down your throat.
That desire to be About Something, but not anything deeper than the most surface level belief that “authoritarianism is bad,” comes across as bland and unspecific. On the flip side, nothing is really funny enough to make you gloss over the more tedious parts of the world building (if Richards knows that the TVs have the ability to watch him Big Brother style, why would he watch the TV while on the run?). This problem becomes insurmountable by the film’s third act, when Richards takes a girl named Amelia (Emilia Jones) as a hostage. The film lends weight to Richards’ take down of her as a spoiled brat with a scarf that costs more than the medicine his child needs to live, but this is one of many sequences in “The Running Man” that feels like there was something left on the cutting room floor. Amelia and Richards somehow end up at a mutual understanding, but the reasons why feel hastily slapped together.
Powell is a capable action lead, and he’s best here when he’s having a little fun with Richards’ unbridled rage, such as when he gets a little snarky with a network psychologist when they have him play word association games (Authority? Burn! Anarchy? When!?). But when he just has straight-up anger to play – and anger in the most generically masculine way, ready to kill someone over comments about his wife or daughter – it doesn’t feel as strong.
The biggest problem with Richards, however, isn’t Powell – far from it. It’s that while the movie wants us to believe he’s growing throughout this experience, he doesn’t actually have all that much growing to do in the first place. At one point, he tells Elton (Michael Cera), a rebel giving him a place to hide, that he doesn’t care about revolution, or being some spark to ignite revolt – he only cares about his wife and daughter.
While he does care about his family (and he never lets us forget it), the rest of this statement is demonstrably untrue. This is a guy who has lost three jobs because of his inability to not help other people, who has helped total strangers in need, who has told figures in authority that he’s pro-union. There’s nothing about Ben Richards that makes the audience believe he wouldn’t be all for what Elton is selling. It’s one of so many things about “The Running Man” that, if you think about it for more than a few seconds, doesn’t make much sense. And the more you pick at those threads, the more they unravel.