'The Running Man' struggles to escape the familiar
Paramount
A controversial TV show whose biggest concern is ratings? Oh my stars!
From “Quiz Show” to “The Truman Show” to “The Hunger Games” and many more, movies about onscreen competition very frequently touch on the agenda of the makers compared to the best interests of the players. (I know “The Truman Show” isn’t a competition, but the show does aim to see how he navigates and if he will win at life.) There’s a case to be made that remaking “The Running Man” — originally a 1982 Stephen King novel, then a 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle — was almost guaranteed to feel kinda stale.
So credit Edgar Wright for injecting enough of his trademark liveliness to make the Glen Powell version enjoyable-ish, even if he’s arguably the wrong filmmaker for the job.
Expanding the premise into public spaces and thus making it resemble the Jake Johnson-directed “Self Reliance,” Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall (“21 Jump Street”) send Ben Richards (Powell) running for his life, with $1 billion waiting for him if he survives the month. In Wright’s hands, and with repeated acknowledgment of deepfakes and the ability to use technology to deceive, “The Running Man” sometimes feels like a mashup of “Idiocracy” and “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” as a filmmaker better at fun than social commentary struggles to mine much about the public’s susceptibility to suffering as entertainment.
Powell holds the screen and also doesn’t quite make the character’s anger work for him, and the film often manages to be both likable and pretty forgettable. None of the baddies (including Josh Brolin as the exec in charge and Karl Glusman as a merciless henchman) particularly register, and Ben’s plight feels cliche instead of admirable.
If you think you had a good time but can’t remember what you liked, the fun only goes so far.
C+
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