REVIEW: The Running Man

A lot of people have wanted to discuss Edgar Wright's new The Running Man outing as "the remake" of the 1987 film (with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a very different Ben Richards). As for me, I find it more natural to think of it as "another adaptation of ..."

Even so, my mind was also on action blockbusters of the 1980s watching this movie today. But my thoughts didn't linger so much on the Paul Michael Glaser film specifically so much as the general action scene of the day. The era of Bruce Willis and Kurt Russell and the he-men they brought to life. These machine-gun wielding, foul-mouthed anarchists who wanted to tear down the establishment fed a real need for men with a lot of directionless anger.

This was, as it would turn out, the same era in which Stephen King first published The Running Man, telling the story of a down-on-his luck man who tries to rescue his wife and daughter from poverty by winning a televised, nationwide manhunt. (I only read the book once, but based on that recollection, this adaptation seemed to me like perfectly recognizable next to the source material.)

My concern with this type of story has always been a sort of willful glamorizing of a reckless expression of masculinity, fed by delusions that men of this day have somehow reached a boiling point that earlier generations couldn't possibly imagine, so who is anyone to say that these displays of violence aren't justified by the times? And seeing certain developments within American culture in the last year especially, I don't think my fears are unfounded.

I will say, though, that this movie puts a little more effort into linking that brazen anarchy with something a little more human. Ben Richards is not only looking out for his daughter, he's also the kind of guy who will yell for help when an old man in line with him starts vomiting uncontrollably. RE: this is a guy who is genuinely attuned to the needs of the underclass and the disadvantaged.

But it's not so much that Ben Richards fuses these attributes into something greater so much as he just kind of holds both contradictory attributes in him. The movie insists that Richards in all his penchant for brutality is only excelling at this violence because he has to. And, yes, the movie has some internal examination about these things. Not enough, though, to disguise why we're actually here. We still progress through almost every major junction by either shooting something or blowing something up. I'm not sure if this film or the world at large has actually figured out how these things coexist in a person, or even whether they ought to.

Glen Powell is serviceable as a dad, but his few scenes opposite his wife or kid were not necessarily standouts. And in this way, he's not remarkably different from his 1980s ancestors. Powell's mostly just here to give to millennials and gen z what their parents and grandparents had with Sylvester Stallone. And full credit to him, he never feels like he is overcompensating in this.

Colman Domingo gives perhaps the most satisfying performance in the film, like a murderous firework. Josh Brolin is overflowing with a different kind of charisma, but he reigns it in just enough to avoid spilling over into cartoonery.

Emilia Jones of CODA gets snared by the events of the film late in the game, and she brings a believable sort of clueless complicity that gets to metamorphize into something of substance. The parts of the film that worked best for me happened to occur while her character was participating in the plot, and I'm free to imagine that she was in some way directly responsible for this. When I said this movie solves almost all of its problems through violence, I'll concede that her character's introduction gives Ben the chance to do something better (congrats for not killing civilians, I guess?)

I feel like the easy line for a film like this is some variation of how this movie's dystopia just feels like current events ... which it kinda does. (The movie's exposé on totalitarianism and the media feels more prescient in some parts than others, but the fact that it also builds a solid case against generative AI might just fill in the gap.) But again, forecasting was only a part of the goal. Really, this is a retreat into the plastic anger of the 1980s and the hopes that the spirit of John McLane and Rambo will somehow overpower the corrupt institutions in place--and we can all sort out the consequences of what exactly that means later.

--The Professor

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