Edgar Wright Revives Stephen King's Dystopian Classic
Director Edgar Wright has unleashed a vibrant new take on Stephen King's 1982 dystopian novel The Running Man, originally published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. This marks a significant departure from the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film, returning directly to King's source material. The result is a consistently likable and fun sci-fi thriller, though it stops short of delivering the truly disturbing impact the original story intended.
A Futuristic Nightmare Arrives in 2025
The film thrusts us into a recognisably corporate-dominated United States, where Glen Powell portrays Ben, an ordinary man blacklisted from employment after exposing unsafe workplace practices. His situation becomes desperate when he needs money for medicine for his ill daughter. His wife Sheila, played by Jayme Lawson, endures exploitation at her club job, a narrative element handled with more explicit detail in King's original text.
In a fateful decision, Ben signs up for the nation's most popular reality TV spectacle, also called The Running Man. The rules are simple but brutal: survive being hunted by professional killers across the country for 30 days, and win a billion dollars. Ben soon discovers the game is rigged from the start, controlled by shark-like TV executives who have no intention of playing fair.
Punk Aesthetics and a Sugar-Rush Soundtrack
Wright propels the film forward with full-tilt chase sequences that barely pause for breath. The director's signature style is evident in a gritty punk aesthetic, complete with protest 'zines created by an underground resistance. The soundtrack is another Wright hallmark, delivering energetic pop slams including, fittingly, The Spencer Davis Group's 'Keep on Running'.
The television world is populated by memorable characters, with Colman Domingo as the show's unhinged presenter Bobby T Thompson and Josh Brolin as the hard-faced producer Dan Killian, whose eerily white teeth mask his ruthless nature. These figures feel familiar from franchises like The Hunger Games, but the film also cleverly nods to television satires such as Sidney Lumet's Network and Robert Redford's Quiz Show.
Ben's ordeal intensifies as he realises the producers are using AI to create fabricated videos that falsely show him expressing contempt for the public. This introduces a modern technological horror that King could not have envisioned in 1982, and it raises an unsettling question the film doesn't entirely resolve: if such convincing fakes are so easy to produce, what is the purpose of the real, life-threatening running?
A Confident but Slightly Fumbled Finale
This unresolved issue gives the movie a sometimes retro-futurist, steampunk feel, even as it remains entirely watchable and buoyant. Wright directs with confident flair, though the concluding act feels fudged and anticlimactic, lacking the powerful punch the setup promises.
It is a curious coincidence that The Running Man arrives in the same year as another Stephen King adaptation, The Long Walk, which explores a similarly grim concept where the punishment is walking, not running. For all its minor stumbles, Wright's film offers a thoroughly entertaining, high-energy ride. The Running Man sprints into UK cinemas on 12 November, with releases in Australia on 13 November and the United States on 14 November.
