The Running Man review – Glen Powell hits the ground running with a fun update of Stephen King’s shocking futuristic sci-fi satire | film

eThat unstoppable force for good in cinema, Dgar Wright, has revived the sci-fi thriller last seen in 1987 with Arnold Schwarzenegger; Now starring Glen Powell and adapted directly from the original 1982 novel written by Stephen King under his pseudonym Richard Bachman, it’s a futuristic nightmare set in that impossibly distant year of 2025. The resulting film has never been anything but endearing and entertaining – though it’s never been unsettling in the way it’s certainly meant to be, and the ending is dodgy and anticlimactic.

However, there is a lot of fun to be had. Wright accelerates into a sprint for some full-tilt chase sequences. There’s a nice aesthetic with the protest punk music produced by the underground rebels; And Wright always delivers saccharine pop songs on the soundtrack, including, of course, the Spencer Davis Group’s “Keep on Running.” It’s a coincidence that The Running Man arrives in the same year as The Long Walk, also from a King book: a similar idea, only it’s walking, not running.

Powell plays Ben, an honest, hard-working man in a dystopian United States run by a faceless corporation in the traditional way. He can’t get a job after being blacklisted for advocating unsafe practices, but he desperately needs money to buy medicine for his sick daughter. Furthermore, his wife Sheila (Jamie Lawson) is being exploited at the club where she works as a waitress, though King’s original novel is more explicit about the unsavory things she has to do to earn money. In desperation, Ben signs up for a top-rated reality TV show called The Running Man; He has to escape across the United States, pursued by professional killers, and if he can survive 30 days, he will get a billion dollars. But in hindsight, he realizes that these shark-like fascist executives won’t play fair.

Colman Domingo plays eccentric studio host Bobby T. Thompson, and behind the scenes Josh Brolin plays hard-faced producer Dan Killian, who has eerily white teeth. They’re fairly familiar characters from the Hunger Games franchise, but the film also nods to classic small-screen satires like Sidney Lumet’s Network and specifically, I think, to Robert Redford’s Quiz Show, especially in the early scenes in which we see all the lesser shows that Ben could theoretically be involved in.

Ben realizes that he has been set up along the way, smeared as a bad guy, and surreptitiously submits to recruitment initiatives to join more iterations of the show’s franchise if he falls in line with their lies. But wait. Killian uses artificial intelligence in fake videos that show Ben spouting ugly snubs at the audience: a level of digital fabrication that King never imagined when he wrote it. And if they can fake it all so easily, what’s the point of making anyone go through all that in real life at all?

It’s an uncomfortable problem that the film doesn’t fully resolve; As a result, The Running Man sometimes feels retro-futuristic and edgy, though it’s always watchable and peppy. Wright made a confident move.