The Running Man was created in an attempt to make a more faithful adaptation of the original Stephen King novel. It stars Glen Powell and Josh Brolin. Is this just another mindless fun action film, or is there something within this film that makes it stand out?

Charlie’s Review:

Disclaimer: Some Spoilers Ahead

The Running Man seemed like an interesting film to me. I haven’t seen the original adaptation with Arnold Schwarzenegger or read the Stephen King book, so I went in completely blind in terms of what I could expect, and I actually really liked it.

Let’s get into parts I liked, starting with the cast. I liked the performances of many actors. Glen Powell was really good as Ben Richards, a dad who is desperate for money to help tend to his sick kid. He got let go from his job, and the only way he could get money and get out of the city he resided in was to compete in a gameshow known as The Running Man. In the show, you are being hunted for 30 days and if you survive all 30 days, you win one billion dollars. Another character I liked was Josh Brolin’s character, Dan Killian, who was the person in charge of The Running Man. His sense of deception with Ben Richards was really intriguing to me. His performance reminds me of a lot of billionaires nowadays, as he says things that a normal person loves to hear but in reality, the actual truth is the complete opposite of what he is saying or showing. Another thing I liked about the film was its story and the aspects of the network changing and rigging the game show for personal benefit. In general, I really like stories about the government and the lives people are living being rigged. It can mirror a fear that people have in the real world today.

There actually weren't too many things that I didn’t like about the movie, but there were some aspects of predictability, which wasn’t bad, but was noticeable. The main predictable part was with two characters who you knew were going to die, specifically Katy M. O’Brian and Martin Herlihy’s characters of Laughlin and Tim Jansky. Their characters were the other players of The Running Man gameshow along with Ben Richards. Tim Jansky plays a more noobish character who hardly knows how to properly survive. Laughlin is someone who parties and has lots of fun knowing she’ll die. Another problem was the tone of the film could be inconsistent. Sometimes it was very serious, sometimes it was very silly. Personally, I didn’t mind that all too much.

Overall, The Running Man was a pretty fun time and a very nice adaptation. If you are a fan of action movies and films featuring a rigged system controlling the world, then this is for you. As for the rating, I would give The Running Man a 7.8/10.

Max's Review:

Disclaimer: some spoilers ahead

The reviews and Rotten Tomatoes scores for this movie tell a pretty grim story. When I saw a 64% critic rating on the way to the theater, I was worried. What caught me off guard was that the trailers had been exciting, the cast was solid, and the director was a personal favorite of mine, not to mention that the film was aiming to be a more faithful adaptation of a Stephen King book. It seemed as though the subject matter and personnel were there to make a good movie, and despite what critics may say, I believe they were. 

The Running Man does not take the approach I would have liked it to, and as much as I like Edgar Wright (Baby Driver is a personal favorite), I’m not sure he was the right director for this film. Stephen King’s work, for those who know it, tends to be quite grim. King isn’t without levity, but Wright’s quippy and slick action didn’t always jive with the source material. “Tonally confused” is probably the best way to describe it; the film is frequently floating between images of class oppression and sarcastic one-liners. This issue is not exclusive to The Running Man, but it prevents the film from committing to one aesthetic, such that neither is done as well as they could be. However, truth be told, I didn’t notice most of these issues during my initial viewing. That’s because the film, like much of Wright’s work, is perfectly engaging and well-paced when you’re watching it. The Running Man offers an ostensibly tense plot that naturally keeps the watcher engaged and relatively oblivious to what they might be missing out on. As you are soon to see, pacing, ironically, is what keeps the movie together.  

First among the movie’s positives, the cast; Powell does a great job as the upstanding, all-too-virtuous blue-collar hero, and Brolin is perfectly hateable as a corrupt corporate exec. Neither of them plays especially complex roles, but they do a great job of fulfilling them. The conflict is simple, but the movie does a great job in making you want to see Richards succeed and bring Killian down. For a movie of this length and style, it's actually the perfect plot; it's simple, opens up opportunities for the film’s main offering, action, and creates a very satisfying underdog narrative. 

Second, the best part of Wright’s films, the action. The Running Man is an action-first, plot-based movie. That means commentary and character spend most of their time on the back burner while action, tension, and plot take the forefront. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, it serves Wright as a director. Action scenes were inventive and synced well with the music. They never reach the same action-music highs as Baby Driver, but Richards’s many escapes and traps are all well-done and unique. Each sequence was distinct in its own right and accomplished something within the story. The final plane scene and Richards’s escape with Elton were standouts. Elton’s character, played by Michael Cera, makes for humorous, borderline slapstick violence.  

However, therein lies the issue: slapstick. Elton and Richards’s escape is perfectly fun to watch when it happens, and the humor lands as well as it can, but Elton’s death, which comes only a few moments later, feels out of place. This, I believe, is the principal problem with the movie and why Edgar Wright may not have been the right choice. On its surface, the film is about a disenfranchised, industrial worker who gets dragged into a lethal gameshow. That plot is rife with opportunities, commentaries, and most importantly, a certain seriousness, most of which elude this movie. The quippy dialogue and banter, while maybe funny, give this movie an identity crisis. On one hand, it's trying to be faithful to the book, and on the other, it's got this secondary fixation with injecting witty jokes into the violence, which takes away from a chance to say something. In Wright’s other movies, like Baby Driver, there’s wit and banter, but it either comes at the right time or elevates the movie, because it's not about class warfare; it's a heist movie about a slick getaway driver. Wright’s usual strengths, as far as story and characters, become weaknesses. As a result, the movie misses out on saying a few things it could have about systemic injustice and corruption. There are some not-so-subtle, antifascist injections, and the overall message about media consumption is actually pretty solid. But they feel like an addition rather than a part of the actual story. What is there is very on the nose, which I don’t mind because it's saying something that needs to be said, so why bother with all the smoke and mirrors? What I do mind is how shallow the movie tends to be and its inability to take its own message seriously. For a movie about revolution, its own theme is quite agreeable and doesn’t exactly innovate. It's a film more for the aesthetics of revolution and class than one about them. 

There’s also the more minor issue of interconnectedness. The story and characters are not deeply interconnected. Richards will encounter one character at one point, they help him, then it's onto the next, and they never reappear. It's not a big deal, but it makes the film incohesive. In a film about oppressed people and revolution, it would have been nice to see some ‘come together’ moment for all of them. Instead, most of them disappear or die after they’ve played their part. 

At this point, you are probably wondering how, with a list of criticisms like that and a comparatively small list of positives, I found the movie to be as good as I did. The answer is: I’m biased; I didn’t notice the mistakes while I was watching it the first time; it was well-paced; and most of all, the movie was fun. I was entertained for two hours. Ironically, the film tries to be about why mindless entertainment and media are bad, but putting that aside, I liked it. There are a number of other things I would have done differently and plenty of mistakes that I picked apart in hindsight, but truth be told, a lot of movies are like this. The secret is their pacing and excitement, which makes you forget about the glaring plothole or missed opportunity. The Running Man does that. It's entertaining, and it was fun to kill two hours in the theater. It takes a certain skill to turn a subpar or mediocre movie good by making you forget its faults. That's the magic of The Running Man: it can just outrun a lot of its mistakes. 

I give The Running Man a 7.3/10.