‘I don’t know how yet, but I am gonna fuck you up someday…’
It’s been a stellar year for Stephen King adaptations with cinematic adaptations of The Running Man, The Monkey, The Long Walk and The Life of Chuck, as well as The Institute and IT: Welcome to Derry on the small screen. While it’s generally accepted that The Long Walk has been the most successful of these, the reception to The Running Man has been decidedly mixed. Let’s dive in…
In a dystopian future, Ben Richards (Glen Powell) finds himself blacklisted from his labouring job and unable to afford basic essentials like medicine for his poorly kid. Things are so bad that Richards’ wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson), is considering pulling a few shifts in a strip club. Desperate, angry and running out of options, Richards decides to try out for The Running Man – a popular TV programme where the “runners” can win $1 billion by surviving 30 days, while the Network’s five hunters, led by the mysterious Evan McCone (Lee Pace), as well as ordinary citizens, try to find and kill them. John Brolin appears as Dan Killian, the unscrupulous producer of The Running Man, while Colman Domingo plays the host.
Now, the first thing to address here is that this is not an adaptation of Paul Michael Glaser’s 1987 film starring the big man himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger. No, this is an adaptation of Stephen King’s original 1982 novel (published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman). The differences between the book and the first film adaptation are stark. Director Edgar Wright tries to marry the camp ’80s feel of the latter with the grimy, bleak aesthetic of the novel, and does so in a mostly successful way. There is a strong argument that those two versions of this story are so different that it would be impossible to marry them together in a truly satisfying way, however. That being said, I got no real sense of this as an Edgar Wright film. To say that at one point he was one of the most original and innovative directors in the industry this is a little disappointing, and I think this is probably the main reason why the reaction to the film has been so muted. This feels more like a director-for-hire situation than the work of an auteur.
Indeed, rather than Wright, it is actually Powell who emerges as the most significant voice here. His all-action performance confirms his status as one of the best leading men working in Hollywood today, and it is his natural charisma that carries the film across its too-long running time. The supporting cast doesn’t fare as well, however, with Brolin excellent but underused, Pace hidden behind a mask for most of the movie, and even Michael Cera, an actor that I love, doesn’t really work here (a fault with the tonal inconsistencies of the narrative rather than the actor). And this is the problem. Wright doesn’t stamp enough of his personality on this film. By trying to please everyone, by trying to recapture the tone of the first film adaptation whilst still staying true to the source material, Wright has ended up with a film that falls between two stools.
The Running Man is not a bad film by any means. It’s fast-paced, occasionally thrilling and nearly always entertaining, but it also lacks substance and suffers in comparison to the other King adaptation set in a dystopian future released in 2025, The Long Walk. A missed opportunity.
