Those who prefer political allegories to be loud, boisterous and delivered with the blunt force of a police baton to the head will enjoy Edgar Wright’s brashly entertaining version of The Running Man. It might not be especially sharp in its insights or tidy in its plotting, but it’s a rousing, cobweb-clearing blast of a movie: a piece of propulsive popcorn entertainment that feels like a direct descendent of 1990s Paul Verhoeven (there are shades of Total Recall, in particular) with a touch of the satirical cynicism of Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy.
The film – which takes as its source material Stephen King’s novel, rather than the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle – unfolds in a dystopian future America in which affordable healthcare is a distant fantasy for most, and where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a tiny, greedy elite while the majority struggle to survive on scraps. Power – political and otherwise – is in the hands of corporations. Principal among these is the Network, an entertainment mega-corp that numbs hunger pangs and quells any rumblings of dissent through an appetising package of hate figures and extreme violence: the wildly popular reality TV show, The Running Man, on which contestants try to outrun “hunters” hired to kill them. King’s 1982 novel, it’s worth noting, was set in 2025.
Citizens are bludgeoned by content so they don’t notice the attrition of human rights, the 24/7 surveillance and the ‘DNA sniffers’ in the street lights
Ben Richards (Glen Powell) has been fired for insubordination from every job he has ever held; now he finds himself blacklisted for all future opportunities of gainful employment. Meanwhile, his toddler has a fever and a hacking cough and his wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) is forced to cajole tips from wealthy punters in a glorified hostess bar. The only option left open to a man with Ben’s chequered employment history is to offer himself up to the Network as a contestant on one of their shows – although not, he promises his tearful wife, The Running Man. Unfortunately, extensive psychometric testing reveals that Ben is the angriest man who has ever applied to the Network, so his options are once again limited: The Running Man, or nothing.
Powell has movie star charisma to spare and displays a wide-ranging skillset here, including the ability to dangle from the side of a building wearing just a hand towel during a memorable action sequence. But he is not convincing as the angriest man in an American hellscape. People as sunny and golden as Powell don’t tend to have vast reservoirs of rage to draw upon. His scenes of righteous fury are like watching a labrador puppy play-growling.
Still, Ben’s a decent man: he was fired for standing up for his co-workers against workplace radiation exposure. And the magnetic Powell is the engine that drives the action, at the expense of some of the supporting characters. Katy O’Brian’s fellow contestant Laughlin is an opportunity wasted: she is given a few cursory scenes – nothing like the kind of mayhem and excess that fans of her film Love Lies Bleeding might have hoped for. Emilia Jones, although pivotal in the third act, struggles with a role that feels chronically underdeveloped.
The main pleasure of the picture is the chance to see Wright (Baby Driver, Last Night in Soho) equipped with a studio-sized budget. It’s a spectacular piece of world-building: a dystopia seeded with sly, referential winks to the audience and sardonic humour. Citizens are bludgeoned by content – a Kardashian-alike reality show called The Americanos is ubiquitous – so they don’t notice the attrition of human rights, the 24/7 surveillance and the “DNA sniffers” built into street lights.
Like Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent One Battle After Another, this is a film that speaks to the zeitgeist. Both pictures use Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised prominently on the soundtrack; both repackage revolutionary themes into pop culture – politainment, if you will. Cynics might dismiss this as a sop for the disenfranchised, much like the reality show at the heart of The Running Man: a dose of catharsis designed to dissuade disaffected audiences from starting an actual revolution. There’s certainly an irony at play in a film about a man punished for speaking out being produced by Paramount Pictures which, under its new Trump-friendly ownership, reportedly circulated a blacklist of pro-Palestine actors and film-makers it will refuse to work with.
Still, there’s no denying that The Running Man is of the moment – tapping into an “us and them” sense of simmering injustice while delivering a rattling good time.
Photograph by Ross Ferguson