Why make The Running Man a comedy? Stephen King’s novel was a furious political thrill ride about a man out of options, forced to fight for his life (and family) against a corrupt government, exploitative media, and cruel capitalist system that turned impoverished people into prey for a ravenous TV show that makes their murders entertainment. Yet when Edgar Wright, who’s previously blended horror and comedy with Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End, read this book, he apparently thought what was missing from The Running Man was slapstick and an endless supply of jokes, peppered by peculiar product placement.
That’s not to say a dystopian movie can’t be a successful comedy. Look to Zombieland, Sorry to Bother You, The Lobster, or Tank Girl (but not Electric State). Yet the very premise of The Running Man novel, from which this movie pulls heavily, is so dark and furious that casting a hunky movie star, Glen Powell, to play silly and sexy while also being politically challenging is absurd. (Perhaps this is why the Schwarzenegger adaptation veered far from the book’s plot for a more audacious, even cartoony, vision of dramatic dystopia.) The critiques Wright’s film half-heartedly makes can’t land, as the comedy constantly undercuts the viciousness of this particular dystopia. The result is a flashy film that wants to have it both ways in terms of violence and complacency.
The Running Man is truer to King’s book than the Schwarzenegger version.
Credit: Paramount Pictures
Exuding an athletic but not hyper-muscular brand of masculinity, Glen Powell is a more grounded “running man,” a stark contrast to the 1987 action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. That adaptation took only a sliver of King’s novel to spin an outrageous tale well suited to the pumped-up masculinity of its larger-than-life action star, who played a wrongfully convicted hero-cop surrounded by aggro, beefy, and eccentric hunters with names like Fireball, Dynamo, and Buzzsaw.
In Wright’s more faithful adaptation, Powell is more of an everyman. Far from some almost superhuman figure, his Ben Richards is a blue-collar worker who has been fired from one job after another for standing up for his fellow workers. Blacklisted for his “commie” sympathies (Ben is pro-union), he turns to The Network to provide for his wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson), and their sick baby, Cathy.
Run by Dan Killian (Josh Brolin mimicking Dennis Quaid’s chin-forward mugging in The Substance), The Network is a game show channel that flings the desperate into an array of vicious games that promise embarrassment, injury, and death in exchange for cash prizes. Richards is hoping for a less deadly show (like Speed the Wheel), but is cast in The Running Man. To get back to his family, he’ll need to play by Killian’s twisted rules, surviving 30 days being tracked by paid “goons” (who’ve taken the place of police) and a celebrity hunter named Evan McCone (a masked Lee Pace). Making things even harder, fans of the show can report on his location and get paid for tips leading to his on-camera execution.
Fans of the book might well appreciate that Wright, who co-wrote The Running Man with his Scott Pilgrim vs. the World collaborator Michael Bacall, stays pretty close to King’s plot points for much of the runtime. However, where Wright turns to comedy, he veers hard from King’s tone and thereby intentions, caving to audiences’ basest impulses for bloody, mindless cinematic spectacle.
The Running Man pulls its punches through slapstick.
Credit: Paramount Pictures
Let’s start with the violence. There’s plenty of it, from gunshot wounds to booby traps and explosions. Yet Wright is careful about who will get hurt onscreen. Nameless “runners” from the titular TV show will be served up as comedic canon fodder in a goofy montage to explain the show’s premise and inescapability. A barrage of goons will be fed into the violence spectacle grinder. But when it comes to characters the audience might be invested in — be they heroes to love or villains to loathe — Wright holds back, with few exceptions.
Pivotal plot points involving major character deaths don’t hit hard because Wright either cuts away from the killing blow or cops out on the carnage that such a violent end could have (especially in a movie where life is cheap and gore is cheered). When it comes to good guy deaths, this sheepishness for onscreen violence might be explained as not wanting to sour the fun of this action-comedy by making us actually think about the real horrors of such violence. But why go easy on the movie’s big bads? Why pull those punches?
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In place of the kind of violence that would make The Running Man‘s R-rating feel truly fitting, Wright delivers a tamer provocation: cursing. There are a lot of four-letter words, which is perhaps supposed to play as funny, or macho, or defiant. But Richards and others repeatedly calling those oppressive authority figures “shit eaters” just feels juvenile (especially when he’s literally just eaten shit in a sewer escape).
The Running Man is afraid to confront American politics directly.
Credit: Paramount Pictures
Most frustrating, however, is that Wright and Bacall use comedy to undercut any political earnestness or even dramatic tension in the film. For instance, Ben is running for his life from the hunters, but nudity is used to amuse. Powell not only strips down to a towel, then his birthday suit, but also pops into his messy escape a dangerous stunt deflated by a cheap joke. To quote Ben, “Why?!” Later in the film, an oddball ally, played by Scott Pilgrim’s leading man Michael Cera, delivers a passionate speech about police corruption only to immediately make a joke by cavalierly plugging a real-world energy drink brand. Why let the critique land when we can instead comfort a mainstream audience with a kooky visual gag?
Of course, there is a way to make a political statement while working in brand sponsorships. Consider how Josie and the Pussycats made such branding a villain within the plot of its film even as it bandied about a plethora of brand names, or how Fight Club only featured brand names during intense scenes of violence or terrorism. Wright’s nowhere near so daring, making soft punchlines of each product placement without a critique behind their appearance. Plus, it’s hard to take the political monologue about poverty Richards screams at a rich, white girl (Emilia Jones) he’s taken captive all that seriously when he’s flashing $20,000 veneers. As I said with The Lost Bus, Hollywood leading men cannot play impoverished everymen with clearly costly smiles. Look at Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon. He gets it!
Yet the wildest choice Wright makes is how he carefully frames this dystopia of crippling economic inequality as a place devoid of race politics. Set in a world in which both Schwarzenegger’s political career and President Barack Obama are referenced, The Running Man carefully sets up a critique of economic inequality while dodging how systemic racial inequality ties in. These choices in screenwriting and casting could be an editorial unto themselves, but require a lot of spoilers. Essentially, Wright seems to dodge issues of race so as not to risk making his audience uncomfortable as they watch slaughter for fun. He presents an American dystopia where people are lining up to be hunted for spectacle so they can get a taste of what it means to even briefly have wealth, and yet they’ve overcome racism?
Perhaps it’s naive to expect a studio-made movie with a reported $100 million budget to have anything all that challenging to say about American society. Maybe it’s best we leave that to foreign filmmakers who’ve given us such hilarious, thrilling, and thought-provoking films as Triangle of Sadness, Parasite, and Mickey 17. (Oh, wait. That last one was an American-studio produced movie — from this year even!)
Still, The Running Man isn’t all infuriating.
The best part of The Running Man is the character actors.
Credit: Paramount Pictures
Props to Brolin, who, as he has in Weapons and the Avengers movies, sinks his teeth into playing a real ruthless bastard. Pace, though criminally masked for much of the film, still exudes a titillating intensity through sheer physicality as the ruthless lead hunter. Colman Domingo is enthralling as the merciless host of The Running Man, delivering killer fashion sense and a Caesar Flickerman-level of showmanship for government propaganda. William H. Macy brings a suitable Mystery Men-like weariness as a caring black-market dealer. Sandra Dickinson channels IT as a deranged fan of The Running Man TV show. Michael Cera brings a grounded sincerity as a zine-making rebel before leaning into Wright’s indulgences for a Home Alone-like zaniness. Angelo Giorgio Gray and Daniel Ezra bring heart as a pair of brothers short-changed by a problematic script. And Katy O’Brian, who keeps proving a highlight in a barrage of big movies that don’t know what to do with her — see Twisters, Christy, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, all movies in which O’Brian has brief but sensational appearances — is terrific fun.
In The Running Man, she’s another runner, one who is committed to queer debauchery, not hiding from the cameras but being out, loud, and defiant at strip clubs and casinos. This woman is a dynamo with explosive screen presence. For more of her, check out Love Lies Bleeding and Queens of the Dead. And join me in manifesting a big-budget movie that understands she should be the damn lead.
Credit: Paramount Pictures
Anyhow, The Running Man is a bizarre movie. Through a collection of wild game shows and a Keeping Up with the Kardashians parody called The Americanos, Wright offers a critique of how reality TV might mollify the masses by turning class conflict into easy-to-digest entertainment. But then he offers a fictionalized form of this same popcorn-munching fuel by undermining The Running Man‘s inherent politics by feeding into audience’s bloodlust and avoiding such taboo topics as race.
Perhaps Wright was less interested in adapting King’s novel than having his own run at the concept that made the Schwarzenegger version such a wild ride. Maybe this English filmmaker never intended to say anything all that profound about American society. But playing so close to King’s concept while embracing the cliches of American action movies creates a dissonance that’s not just unsatisfying, it’s infuriating. In the end, The Running Man is a sloppy collage of violence, action, and cheap jokes that is far more style than substance.