Director: Edgar Wright
Writers: Michael Bacall, Edgar Wright, based on the novel by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)
Cast: Glen Powell, William H. Macy, Lee Pace, Michael Cera, Emilia Jones, Daniel Ezra, Jayme Lawson, Sean Hayes, Colman Domingo, Josh Brolin, Kay O’Brian, Martin Herlihy

As long as a cinema has been around, filmmakers have been casting social commentary through their films like it’s going out of style, but clearly that’ll never happen, especially as long as we have a society that’s becoming more and more dystopian day by day. It also says a lot when a darkly conceived book written in the eighties is just as relevant now, if not more so than it was then; it’s also not gone amiss that the book is set in 2025. We can always count on Stephen King to bring us a terrifying glimpse into a potential future for mankind, but this is a relatively new arena for writer/director Edgar Wright, who is usually of the more light-hearted, comedic or adventurous persuasion. Has Wright discovered a new edge to his filmmaking, or is he out of his depth with this particular subject matter?

In the near future, the divide between the upper echelons of society and the lower classes has become evermore apparent. The US is ruled by the Network, a media conglomerate that spews out game shows to entertain the rich, present minimal chances for the poor to win money or lift themselves out of poverty all together and generally distract everyone from the thumb they are under. The toughest and most popular show is The Running Man, in which three contestants must survive a month without being hunted down and killed if they want to win one billion ‘new dollars’. Ben Richards (Powell) puts himself up for The Running Man when he and his wife are unable to buy medicine for their sick daughter. As Ben fights to survive, he finds his anger and care for others pushed to the limits, but he also discovers that he’s not alone in his desire to revolt.

In 1987, Arnold Schwarzeneggar was Ben Richards in a very different The Running Man adaptation (you can catch him in a small blink-and-you’ll-miss-it photographic cameo in this version). It was heavier on the action, lighter on the personal stakes. Wright’s version surpasses the ’87 film in just about every aspect, taking things back to the book and remaining relatively true to King’s story, following much the same plot and elements of dystopia. However, Wright’s signature wit and comedy overtakes the mood of the film far too often, creating a tonal mess that results in difficulty taking the film’s themes seriously. The gritty quality of King’s story is mostly gone after the first act of the film and once we’ve gotten an idea of how Richards lives; he is supposed to be a guy who has been fully beaten down by the Network and at rock bottom with absolutely no choice but to essentially lay down his life for his family, but we don’t see that depth on film. Much of Richards’s dialogue is either coated in humour or obscene amounts of exposition that verges dangerously on patronising. Empathy is felt for his family, even for some of those around him, but sadly not for this incarnation of Richards.

The positives of the film lie within the pacing and the production design. There is never a dull moment between Richards’s constant running and the stakes getting higher as he nears the end of his thirty days. The futuristic yet familiar settings reinforce the parallels between this fictional dystopia and the potential for our own disastrous near future. The costuming is far easier to get onboard with than the skin-tight jumpsuits of ’87, mostly because the wardrobe is virtually the same as what we have now; it’s mostly the tech that has evolved and maintains the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. The ending has also been extended a little from that in the book, which made sense for the sake of not leaving the audience with blue balls (the ending worked in the book, but the film definitely needed something closer to closure). There are also a few Stephen King easter eggs to watch out for, for the keen-eyed amongst King fans.

I’m not entirely sure if Glen Powell’s performance was lacking or Ben Richards’s unlikability was purely down to the script, because he came off as unlikable too often for a protagonist we’re supposed to be rooting for; he was not as perturbed as his book counterpart and his fury was far more on-the-surface, less of a quiet rumbling of rage bubbling up. I think any actor in the role could only have done what the script demanded of him, therefore I think Powell did the best he could with the material he was given. Josh Brolin’s Dan Killian, the big antagonist and puppet-master, embodied everything we see of dictatorship, greed and corruption in reality and was a good representation of the book’s character. Brolin plays the villain a little too well, his performance both menacing and utterly believable. The rest of the cast tend to come and go, with their performances generally being quite minimal, but the standouts had to be William H. Macy, who puts a lot of varied emotions into a small role, and Emilia Jones, whose character holds up a mirror to those of us that sit back and watch as things happen to the world while we say ‘well, at least it ain’t happening to me’.

Edgar Wright was perhaps too unserious (tonally) a filmmaker for this film and its genre. A filmmaker who thrives in dark stories – Zack Snyder comes to mind as an example – could possibly have taken it to the depths needed. Having said that, while The Running Man is a great story, we don’t necessarily want or need reminders of our reality right now. As of writing (I came a little late to the release of this film), The Running Man appears to have bombed at the box office in spite of relatively positive reviews ($67 million against a budget of $110 million after four weeks of release). It’s perhaps unsurprising – the social commentary on and reminder of how dystopian our world is becoming has been saturating the film/television/book markets for decades, and we’re probably a little tired of it. We’d quite like to stop being forced to run and take a little break for now, as is our right – so it is right now, at least…