The Running Man is in cinemas from Wednesday 12 November. Add it to your watchlist
On-the-rise action man Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick, Twisters) takes on a role originally played on screen by his Expendables 3 co-star Arnold Schwarzenegger in this explosive, big-budget remake of the 1987 thriller.
Set in a dystopian, totalitarian United States where violent television programmes have become the opium of the people, the original film was based on a 1982 novel by Stephen King (under his Richard Bachman pseudonym), but co-writer/director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Last Night in Soho) has opted to stay even closer to the source material for his adaptation.
So, instead of Arnie’s Ben Richards being a cop coerced to participate in the game, Powell’s Richards is a working-class Everyman living in an overcrowded slum, whose frustration with his inability to hold down a job and look after his waitress wife and their ailing toddler forces him to volunteer for the financially lucrative if lethal Running Man TV show.
Avoid capture for 30 days and $1 billion is the ultimate reward. However, contestants are also hunted across the United States by an elite team of assassins led by a merciless masked mystery man. The action is televised to an audience happy to dob them in to the authorities for a slice of the financial pie, all under the auspices of ever-smirking network CEO and smug puppet-master Dan Killian (Josh Brolin).
Killian and motor-mouthed MC Bobby T (Colman Domingo) consider Richards a ratings winner, especially when he continues to evade his murderous pursuers and their ever-present drone cameras, and then survives by the skin of his teeth when they do get close, as in one fiery encounter at a down-at-heel Boston hotel. However, could Richards’s resilience and apoplectic defiance inspire something other than bloodlust from viewers and threaten their best-laid corporate plans?
No stranger to delivering breakneck action (Hot Fuzz, Baby Driver), Wright produces plenty of nerve-jangling, kinetic set-pieces, whether it is a deadly game of chicken on a bridge or the climactic airborne stand-off. The fact the deadly contest takes place across the US (rather than a murky underground labyrinth as seen in the 1987 movie) also expands the scope of the story, revealing an America riven by economic inequality and manipulated by a self-satisfied few who have no qualms about using fake news to control the narrative.
A similar theme fuels The Long Walk – released earlier this year, and also based on an early King story – in which televised survival of the fittest is used to distract ordinary folk from their impoverished plight. It’s the type of allegory that Wright’s director idol George A Romero (of Night of the Living Dead fame) would have applauded.
However, the episodic nature of the plot, with Richards having to don a variety of disguises to lay low and avoid recognition, occasionally leads to a lull in the pace and a lessening of tension.
Nevertheless, Powell proves to be a charismatic hero, bristling with anger but also able to stay alive thanks to his own ingenuity and much-needed assistance from those he meets on his travels, such as cameoing William H Macy, Emilia Jones (CODA) and Michael Cera (star of Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs the World), whose mercurial rebel lives in an elaborately booby-trapped bolt-hole worthy of Rambo.
Oh, and regarding cameos, keep your eyes peeled for a left-field appearance from Schwarzenegger himself.
