Film Review: The Running Man

The Running Man
Director: Edgar Wright
Kinberg Genre, Complete Fiction
In Theaters: 11.14.2025

If you’re looking for an escape from everything that’s wrong with the world right now and want to disappear into a world that’s nothing like ours, The Running Man is absolutely NOT the movie for you. On the other hand, if you’re in the mood for some uncomfortably pointed and spot-on science fiction satire that’s packed with action, director Edgar Wright’s new take on the Stephen King novella might just be the film for you.

In a dystopian future of severe income inequality, where America is a totalitarian police state and media is both a distraction and a means of control, The Running Man dominates the airwaves — a brutal reality show where “Runners” fight to survive for 30 days while being hunted by elite killers, every moment streamed to a ravenous audience. Ben Richards (Glen Powell, Twisters), a laid-off factory worker blacklisted after protesting unfair labor laws, volunteers for the show to earn money for his sick daughter’s treatment. The show’s charismatic but cold-blooded producer, Dan Killian (Josh Brolin, No Country For Old Men, Deadpool 2) immediately sees something in Ben’s charisma and anger issues, believing that he’ll make a perfect contestant who gets the audience engaged — and he’s not wrong. Ben’s courage and refusal to play by the rules make him a sensation, transforming him from victim to rebel hero. As his popularity surges, so does the threat to his life, the game and the corrupt empire built on the nation’s hunger for violence.

The 1987 version of The Running Man, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, was a movie with a great setup that never realized its potential. Given this, and the fact that its themes and its portrayal of an America on the verge of destroying itself are more relevant than ever before, it’s exactly the kind of movie that should be remade. Wright’s take on the material is loud, violent, in-your-face and anything but subtle, but it’s also very entertaining and often very clever. The influence of Steven Spielberg’s 2002 classic Minority Report, another film that used cautionary science fiction to explore hot button political issues, is everywhere — The Running Man does struggle to create much of a feeling of originality. This would be a bigger problem if it wasn’t so much guilty fun and if it didn’t have so much to say about a world where the working class exist as pawns to the 1%, or how mass media in the wrong hands becomes both a weapon and a drug. If you’ve ever found yourself trying to wrap your head around how the public got sold on Donald Trump, Wright’s film makes a powerful statement about media — manufactured reality and revisionism that certainly applies. While The Running Man is hardly as groundbreaking as Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, it’s closer to being that kind of irreverent and unsettling warning than it is just another assembly line action flick like the now-painful-to-watch 1987 film is. Wright is also one of the few directors who can get this violent and have it work for me, because he uses it either for parody or to say something. In this case, it’s a mix of both.

Powell makes a terrific every-man action hero in the Bruce Willis vein, and Wright has seized on the opportunity to utilize the character acting skills he so ably displayed in Hit Man by having Ben do various voices and accents while trying to hide his identity. The best aspect of the Schwarzenegger version is the performance of the late Richard Dawson as Killian and here the character has been split in two: Brolin is effectively smarmy and villainous as Killian the producer, and Colman Domingo (Sing Sing) is electrifying as Bobby T, the razzle dazzle host. Michael Cera (Barbie, The Phoenican Scheme) is a scene stealer as Elton Parrakis, a revolutionary who comes to Ben’s aid. Emilia Jones (CODA) doesn’t show up until the film’s third act as Amelia Williams, a wealthy young woman who ends up in a hostage situation with Ben, but as a big fan, I found her performance to be worth the wait.

The Running Man isn’t going to work for everybody, but I found it to be a blast. My only major nagging problem in recommending it is the ultimate irony involved: in being released by Paramount Pictures, who owns CBS, the movie literally belongs to a company that has shown an alarming willingness to help pave the way for state-sponsored propaganda and payoffs to corrupt authoritarianism. It feels a bit like getting tips on healthy eating from McDonald’s, and it made me glad that I didn’t pay to see it. —Patrick Gibbs

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