The Running Man

Running on Fumes

Stephen King wrote *The Running Man* in 1982, back when 2025 still sounded like a ridiculous sci-fi date, a place to stash the fantasy of television becoming literal blood sport. Then 2025 showed up. We did not quite get prime-time human hunting, but Edgar Wright’s adaptation lands close enough to contemporary labor misery that it barely plays as warning anymore. The movie feels less like prophecy than like a nasty joke about what people will do for rent and medical bills.



Anyone hoping for the loud neon camp of the 1987 Schwarzenegger version is walking into the wrong theater. Wright and Michael Bacall strip the story back toward something meaner and more threadbare. Their 2025 is a retro-future assembled from old anxieties: thick analog hardware, CRT screens, busted infrastructure, neighborhoods that look left behind on purpose. As Wright put it, "uptown has advanced, and downtown has regressed". You feel that split in every frame. The production design has grime and wear to it, the kind of tactile decay that makes you think you can smell hot wiring and engine smoke.

Glen Powell is the film’s smartest surprise. He has spent the last few years perfecting a movie-star ease—sunny grin, light touch, effortless charm—and Wright uses that familiarity against him. As Ben Richards, Powell looks ground down. He moves like sleep and hope have both been rationed. This is a father out of work, desperate to keep a sick daughter alive, and when he signs away his life to the Network’s 30-day televised hunt, the expression that crosses his face is not courage. It is relief. Finally, money.



Wright is still a kinetic filmmaker, but the energy here is heavier than playful. One sequence in particular sticks: Richards tearing down a fluorescent corridor while a Hunter played by Lee Pace bears down on him and a rover camera glides alongside, turning his panic into live entertainment. The movement is smooth, predatory, merciless. Even when Richards stumbles, the framing stays perfect, because the system is built to make suffering look clean. When he finally rips the camera lens off the wall in a burst of exhausted rage, it feels like the movie stating its thesis outright. The hunt is horrible, yes, but the most degrading part is the way it has been packaged for viewers.

For all that, the movie does not always know how to cash out its ideas. Colman Domingo has a great time as host Bobby Thompson, all polished venom and showman charm, and Josh Brolin gives the network boss a chillingly ordinary corporate ruthlessness. But once the chase expands outward, the satire starts to thin. Sam Adams at *Slate* had the measure of it when he wrote that Wright’s version is "more thoughtful, more genuinely funny" than the 1987 film, but "it sparks to life only for brief periods". I felt that too. The ending, which swaps King’s 9/11-echoing plane crash for a big broadcast hijack, resolves things a little too tidily for a story about systemic cruelty.



Still, the movie leaves a bruise. It may not reinvent dystopian cinema, but it knows exactly what kind of audience it is staring back at: one happy to consume somebody else’s desperation as a night out. That tension is what lingers. By the end I was not only entertained; I felt implicated, which is a nastier and more interesting feeling. Maybe that is the movie’s sharpest trick.