Look at this terrible poster / fuckery on display:
Who the fuck runs like that?
dir: Edgar Wright
2025
This was never a good idea. It wasn’t a success the first time. I’m not saying you can’t remake a movie, because, that’s like 90 per cent of movies these days, but if you couldn’t make a movie work with Arnie in the lead role, what makes you think remaking it with a blancmange, a sculpted lump of tofu like Glen Powell is going to crack the box office?
The original Running Man from 1987 had Arnold in his prime, and it still died at the box office, because audiences weren’t ready to see him star in weird sci-fi adjacent corporate tv satires yet. I mean, there are probably a stack of other reasons why it didn’t delight audiences and make lots of money, but that has to be the main one. Plus audiences, mostly made up of morons, didn’t like watching a movie that mocked them for loving game shows, and telling them they’re morons who consume the dumbest media because they’re sadistic braying donkeys who love watching people die in horrible ways.
What has changed since then? Not much, really.
The most disappointing aspect of this whole endeavour is having Edgar Wright direct such an uninspiring ‘property’. He’s so great and brilliant everywhere else! He’s even delivered multiple parodies of these kinds of movies before, and yet now, as penance, they forced him, perhaps at gunpoint to make an uninspired straight version of the kind of Hollywood movie we thought he probably despised.
This is, for me, the most memorable part of the original Running Man - it’s not Arnie one-liners like “Well that hit the spot” or “he had to split” or “that boy’s one mean motherfucker” uttered by a sweet old lady, or any of the action, strange clothing choices or any other nonsense that happens: it’s the scene where two women are at a vending machine, and, to show how expensive things are in the “future”, being 2017, a can of Coke costs $6, and one of the ladies grunts over how many coins she has to feed into the machine to get her precious drink.
Six bucks? At least they got one thing right about the horrible future they envisaged way back in the 1980s. They got absolutely everything else wrong, though.
Sure, neo-liberalism and corporatism dominated society to a ridiculous extent, but we haven’t had food riots yet (in the States at least). There is the war in Venezuela to look forward to, though.
From the vantage point of the 1980s, they really did imagine that the dystopias of the future would look and feel like the 70s, just with odder clothing, resource shortages, pastel colours and perms as far as the eye could see.
Is Arnie good in the original flick? Of course not, but what does that matter, when has that ever mattered with Arnie? He’s fucking Arnie! That’s his superpower, his calling card and his motivation for everything.
The original also tries to tackle the idea of a group of revolutionaries trying to take on their corporate masters in order to cast off the shackles of oppression, but it’s a whole underground militia. What links there are between the masters of television and the political powers / military junta is not clear, just that it all blurs together In THE FUTURE!
Here, it’s far more explicit that the regime in charge that produces a program as dumb as this one is in cahoots with a privatised corporate police force called the NCG that brutalises whoever the Running Man show wants brutalised, and anyone else as well for good measure.
If the premise of the first flick was somewhat far-fetched; that the most important and viewed program of all time was one in which criminals are hunted and executed by ‘heroic’ hunters, this flick pushes things in an even less believable direction given people’s relationship with linear television these days: people religiously watching one program where three victims are selected, demonised by the program makers, and then graphically executed on camera.
Would people watch that? Of course they would. But what is this thing called ‘television’ they keep referring to? No-one watches that now, so why would they be watching it in the future?
You might say “oh okay well I guess they could make it for a streaming service but…” Nuh, that doesn’t make sense either. It makes far less sense making a flick with this premise now (regardless of what kind of future it’s set in) that it ever did setting it in the 1980s, where at least people could see the concept of merging the slack-jawed masses’ love for game shows with their love of watching people suffer and die as a natural progression of American society.
Today? Well, it looks quaint. American news currently has masked, be-suited goons shooting and beating unarmed protesters, immigrants and pretty much anyone, and it’s being done for the pleasure of one odious man (as well as the remora-like scavengers that affix themselves to his belly or follow in his wake), and clearly these ICE actions are adored by a grateful populace that continuously seems to forget the last line of the famous poem attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller, about how when the Nazis came for the person confessing (about how they did nothing) there was no-one left to protest on their behalf.
So, yes, Americans love violence and guns, well established, but they also love being angry, outraged about something, about injustices real and imagined.
This film has an anger issue. The issue is, is that the main character is angry, and perhaps has good reason to be. But it strikes me as almost funny that this flick, one that’s pretending to tap into a populist vibe, is happy to trade in something so obvious and so fundamental to action cinema that it even has the main character say “I’m angry” out loud, in case we missed it.
I mean, it’s possible that we could have missed it. Glen Powell’s features do seem to have some difficulty with certain expressions. He generally has no difficulty coming across as a smarmy prick (I’m pretty sure his character was called Captain Smarmy Prick in that Top Gun legacy sequel), but other expressions maybe don’t work so well on that bowl of porridge masquerading as a face.
He’s called Ben Richards, and he’s working class, don’t you forget it, and he’s unemployed and unemployable because he stuck up for his fellow workers and was punished for it, and was irradiated for good measure. He’s angry at his former employer and their union busting ways, he’s angry at the health care system that won’t heal his daughter, and he’s angry that there seems to be nowhere else to go to make a buck (money to buy medicine to help her), he’s angry that his wife (Jayme Lawson) has to work as a cocktail waitress or something in order for them to make ends meet. Grrr, how emasculating.
Naturally, he ends up on a show where people will hunt him until he is dead, in order to make a buck or two. He kinda chooses it this time; in the Arnie one, he’s falsely imprisoned and forced to do it, there’s no choice, when the evil government frames him for a massacre he refused to take part in. This one allows the contestants to go wherever they want to avoid the hunters hunting them, but the public can dob them in or kill them themselves if they want, I guess, and it’s meant to go for 30 days of fun and hijinks. The hunters are heroes, the contestants are scum, but they also have to submit a tape of themselves talking shit on camera every day (and post it!) or forfeit.
It… doesn’t sound like a show people would watch. For all the times that people are hiding, and there’s no content, what is the show running to amuse the bored masses? Sure, when you find them and are about to do to them what Israel does to Gaza on the daily, the cameras are ever-present and catching everything in 4K, but the rest of the time there’s just dead air and repeats.
Bobby T (the great Colman Domingo) is a great, oily, poisonous host in the grand tradition of all the worst / best sets of false teeth masquerading as human beings and tv show hosts throughout the years. He has a killer way of delivering his patter, and, look, he’s no stranger to playing absolute arseholes (boo hiss like he does in the Colour Purple remake), but it’s hard to not love him here, mostly because he’s so great when everyone else, especially Powell, are so grating.
The real villain (other than Glen Powell) is Josh Brolin, who just hardly feels like a villain given what and who we’re facing in the real world. We have so many billionaire tyrants to worry about as it is, as they actively try to enshittify our lives, that some corporate shill yelling about ratings and genially cajoling people into doing the unspeakable for their own good almost seems quaint. Brolin tries to make a meal of this role, but he doesn’t get any help from the “star”.
When almost every other character in a movie is more interesting than your main character, well, that’s not uncommon, but man do I wonder why people thought Glen Powell was someone Hollywood could pin all their hopes and dreams on as the next Big Movie Star. His performance is a study in how someone completely lacking in charisma can still somehow end up as the lead in a $100 million dollar action movie (which is very light on the action, thanks for asking).
The character, other than being angry, as if there’s any other emotion men are allowed to express in these dumb kinds of flicks, also doesn’t make that much sense, in terms of going toe-to-toe with trained killers and coming out ahead. He’s just a regular working class guy, but he has a (studio, personal trainer) sculpted body and can kill special forces types in hand to hand combat? Is he maybe dominating them with his aura of mundanity, is that what’s doing the trick?
About the only time where I felt like I was watching an Edgar Wright movie was when Richards ends up with an anti-cop, anti-regime guy played by Michael Cera, when he explains his deep hatred of cops, but even moreso when he enacts his revenge upon them. That felt like something out of Hot Fuzz or Scott Pilgrim.
The rest? Eh. Generic action flick to be forgotten moments after being watched, if not during.
5 times a negative multiplied by a negative doesn’t always result in a positive outside of mathematics out of 10
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“I don't know how yet, but I am gonna fuck you up someday.” – that’s the spirit - The Running Man
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