Whenever The Running Man is brought up, most likely the 1987 sci-fi actioner starring Arnold Schwarzenegger is what most people will think of. Directed by Paul Michael Glaser of Starsky & Hutch fame, it was a solid Arnie flick which had plenty of the Austrian’s trademark puns and satire to rival Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop that came out around the same time. However, for Edgar Wright, his introduction to this story was reading the 1982 novel by Stephen King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Considering that 2025 has been a good year for Stephen King literature successfully making the jump to the big screen, does Wright’s rendition of The Running Man continues that trend?
Whereas the 1987 film served as a loose adaptation of King’s novel taking only the dystopian premise of a televised death sport and the main protagonist’s name Ben Richards, Wright and his Scott Pilgrim co-writer Michael Bacall embraces the source material. Set in the near future where the United States is ruled by an authoritarian media Network, Richards (Glen Powell) is unable to support his family after being blacklisted. Over his wife’s objections, Ben tries out for the Network and is selected for “The Running Man”, a game show in which contestants are allowed to flee anywhere in the world whilst being pursued by “hunters” hired to kill them.
When The Running Man was first published, it was during the Reagan administration and as a response there was a rise in dystopian fiction, which touched upon a sinister side of rich America. Reading the novel, you felt that sense of anger, something that Wright latched onto with his adaptation. Right from the start, Ben Richards, who may love his family and is a good man at heart, the authoritarian system will not give him a break and thus this rage that is threatening to come out and eventually does throughout the course of the game show.
Having impressed us since Top Gun: Maverick, Glen Powell is at his unhinged best when balancing the charisma and the humor. Although there are similarities with what he previously did in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, relishing in a number of disguises that bring out some of the comedy, it is all about the anger that Powell seems gleeful in playing. In fact, everyone else also embraces The Running Man’s manic tone from Colman Domingo’s over-the-top game show host to Michael Cera’s reckless rebel. It is a shame, though, that after Love Lies Bleeding, Katy O’Brien is underused in recent blockbusters, as based on the brief screentime here where she revels in the luxuries of being one of the show’s contestants, she could have had her own film.
By today’s standards, a lot of the film’s dystopian themes are not new, and while Wright knows when to hit them hard for the sake of emotional sequences, without going spoilers, he muddles the ending that differentiates from the source material but results in a deux ex machina that many will question. If anything, Wright is more about delivering the thrill ride and boy, does he deliver.
This may not reach the hyper stylization of Scott Pilgrim or his Cornetto trilogy, Wright approaches the action similar to what he did on Baby Driver, where there is a tactile precision in the way he shoots the chase sequences with cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon’s camera can go from lyrical movements to handheld impact shots. With a heavy dose of gunplay and explosion, as well as subtle references to the 1987 original, there is a clear love of 80s action cinema that relied more on practical effects and stunt work as opposed to the current age of CGI-infested blockbusters.
