Stephen King's novel "The Running Man," published in 1982 under the writer's nom de plume Richard Bachman, is all about left-to-right momentum: it's a thriller synced to a ticking clock.
In theory, it's a perfect vehicle for the British director Edgar Wright, a kinetic visual thinker who's capable of taking generic scenarios and hot-wiring them for speed. As a bonus, he's also an occasionally ace satirist whose love for vintage B movies (sci-fi mysteries and giallos; police procedurals and zombie flicks) doesn't preclude poking fun at their tropes. The dystopian setting of King's story, with its roll call of predatory corporations and modern bread-and-circus spectacle, suits his sensibility as well.
Wright's "Running Man" comes out swinging with some enjoyably crass fake commercials (shades of "Saturday Night Live" and Paul Verhoeven's "RoboCop") and a wry sight gag featuring a wad of futuristic U.S. currency emblazoned with the face of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who starred in the redolently cheesy first film adaptation of the novel in 1987.
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This new version is considerably more faithful to the source material than that incarnation, which swapped out King's urban-manhunt setup for cartoony gladiator theatrics. Wright's grim, grayed-out backdrop feels ripped from King's pages, but the tone isn't quite right.
The filmmaker's great gift is for pop uplift, and his buoyant sensibility is at odds with the heavy melancholy of King's tale. To truly get across its thesis about haves and have-nots -- and how far a member of the latter cohort will go to rise above his station -- "The Running Man" needs to be a downer. Wright gets the cynical, Darwinian humour but also errs on the side of crowd-pleasing -- an unfortunate but inevitable byproduct of working with a massive studio budget in the first place.
King's main inspiration for "The Running Man" was Richard Connell's 1924 short story "The Most Dangerous Game," about a mad aristocrat hunting civilians for sport. Ever attuned to the frequencies of American popular culture, King added the idea of a global television audience cheering on the blood sport from their living rooms.
Wright's film is set in a disease-riddled, class-stratified near-future America where jobs are scarce and solidarity is rarer; our hero, Ben Richards (Glen Powell) is a standup guy whose loyalty to his co-workers gets taken as insubordination.
"You're the angriest applicant we've ever had," smiles FreeVee impresario Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) as he looks at Ben's audition tape for one of his many reality shows -- theatres of cruelty leveraging the contestants' desperation against their willingness to risk life and limb.
The most popular of these is "The Running Man," which obliges its participants to stay alive as long as possible while being hunted by mercenaries outfitted with state-of-the-art weaponry and surveillance tech. Each day becomes monetized, with bonuses for casualties incurred in self-defence.
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Ben doesn't want to do "The Running Man" because he doesn't want to abandon his wife and infant daughter, but he also knows that signing on is the only way to get the latter the medicine she needs. Killian, who knows how to use people in order to juice ratings, offers him an advance on future winnings and a dotted line on which to sign.
The idea of a lethal reality-show is so good that King used it twice early in his career: not only in "The Running Man" but also in "The Long Walk," a more grounded variation on the same theme built around a brutal, round-the-clock frogmarch across the U.S. until only one entrant is left standing.
It's sheer coincidence that both stories got movie versions this year, and unfortunately, Wright's adrenalized spectacle suffers in comparison to Francis Lawrence's patient, emotionally loaded film of "The Long Walk," which feels genuinely gruelling as it drags on.
"The Running Man" moves through its narrative setup and character development so swiftly that we never really get a sense of how the larger world works. The correspondences with our own timeline -- references to ICE and subplots about YouTube conspiracy theorists and deep fakes -- are obvious without being particularly potent.
In scene after scene, we see Ben literally fighting for his life, and yet the feeling that comes through isn't so much desperation but impatience. The violence is impressively nasty but it also gets monotonous (as opposed to the playful, weightless escapism of Wright's "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World," which parodied gauntlet-style action movies with flair).
Obviously, Powell is a different sort of actor than Schwarzenegger, and he's very resourceful, too: he gives his character some rough edges to go with his sense of righteousness. When Ben stares down Killian he seems genuinely unhinged and capable of anything. But while Powell is surrounded by funny, capable character actors -- including Brolin in smarmy corporate demon mode and William H. Macy and Michael Cera as off-the-grid tricksters -- there's nobody who sparks him like Adria Arjona did in Richard Linklater's charming, barbed romantic comedy "Hit Man."
It may be that this is the wrong sort of crossover role for Powell: that trying to go Schwarzenegger, even with a leading-man grin, is a waste of his charisma. Not that he has to worry about getting typecast: despite the very real skill that's gone into its creation, "The Running Man" is forgettable enough that it won't leave a blot on its star's permanent record.