Stephen King’s The Running Man imagines a dystopian future where human misery is packaged as entertainment, where the government snuffs out personal freedoms and the rich reap untold profits while working people are enticed to attack themselves rather than the power structures that keep them oppressed. None of this was a stretch when King, writing under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, published the book in 1982, with Ronald Reagan in the White House and unemployment at its highest point since the Great Depression. But reality seems to have caught up to King’s story, and not just because he set his tale in the unimaginably distant future of 2025.
Edgar Wright’s new movie hews much closer to King’s book than the 1987 version, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as a good-guy cop who gets sentenced to appear on the nation’s top-rated TV show after he refuses to fire on a crowd of unarmed protesters. In addition to losing several jokes about steroid use, that means removing the action from the first film’s enclosed arena, where Schwarzenegger’s character is hunted by gaudy gladiators with pro-wrestling-style names like Fireball and Buzzsaw, and returning it to the outside world, where his enemies expand to include just about everyone. The contestants on The Running Man—the show, not the movie—rack up a cash prize for each day they evade its “hunters,” heavily armed stalkers who have practically unlimited resources to track them down and kill them, preferably live and in prime time. But they also have to watch out for their fellow citizens, who can earn a few dollars for turning them in and even more for doing the dirty work themselves.
In both movies’ United States, there’s still a government in place, at least notionally; the Schwarzenegger version’s unctuous emcee, played by real-life game show host Richard Dawson, carps about having to run things by the Justice Department’s “entertainment division,” and at one point barks, “Get me the president’s agent!” But it’s clear who’s really calling the shots. In Wright’s, co-written with his Scott Pilgrim collaborator Michael Bacall, everything from popular culture to the militarized police force seems to be under the control of an entity known simply as “the Network.” At the center of the grimy, joyless city where Glen Powell’s Ben Richards struggles to scrape out a life, its logo beams down from the top of a single, towering building like the eye of Sauron—a bright-red uppercase N.
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Wright never uses Netflix’s name, of course, and the fact that the film’s murderous programming airs on a service called Free-Vee goes back to King’s novel, years before Amazon appended the name, sans hyphen, to its ad-supported viewing service in 2022. But it’s not exactly hard to get a fix on the movie’s targets. While the Schwarzenegger version collapses the network’s hierarchy into a single figure, Wright’s on-air host, Colman Domingo’s Bobby T., is a mere jester. The real enemy lies further up the org chart, with the show’s producer, Dan Killian (Josh Brolin). And in this world, the members of the ruling class—the ones who prosper while others slave, whose silk scarves cost as much as the flu medicine Ben’s toddler daughter desperately needs—are known simply as “execs.” (That The Running Man is one of the first movies to bear the logo of Trump-friendly billionaire David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is almost too on the nose.)
At one point, Killian explains, executives had the misguided view that their programming ought to aspire to something nobler—to edify, to uplift, rather than to just entertain. But now their motto is simple: Give ’em what they want. And with no regulation or even any apparent competition, the Network can put forth its singular interpretation of that mandate, which involves convincing the average viewer that, no matter how hard their life can be, someone has it worse. On the one hand, there’s Speed the Wheel, on which we watch an overweight contestant sprint inside a human-sized hamster wheel while being pelted with a trivia question about the number of bathrooms on a luxury jet. On the other, there’s The Americanos, a Kardashians-style reality show about a privileged family whose wealth doesn’t prevent them from tearing each other apart. Trying for more will only get you humiliated at best, and even if, by some small chance, you do manage to make it into the ranks of the execs, you’ll still be miserable. Better to just stay where you are—right, folks?
Those satirical glimpses at the Network’s other programming occupy merely a few minutes of screen time, but they’re where The Running Man starts to fall flat. They need to be grotesque, not just clever, because they’re our only chance to watch TV the way this world’s audiences do, without any hint of what’s going on behind the scenes. And we should feel a little degraded by watching them—because, after all, it’s giving us what we want too. As grateful as I was for the brief return of Debi Mazar as The Americanos’ Kris Jenner–esque matriarch, it’s a nudge in the ribs, not a sock in the gut.
Vulgarity is one of the few things Schwarzenegger’s Running Man has going for it. It’s not just sending up repellent, lowest-common-denominator trash; it embodies it, right down to showing its hero grin through blood spatter as he splits one of the hunters up the middle with his own chain saw. It’s not in control of its crassness the way Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop—perhaps the nearest precursor for Wright’s version—is, but it doesn’t shy away from it either. Wright’s is more thoughtful, more genuinely funny, but it sparks to life only for brief periods. The longest involves Michael Cera’s appearance as a literally bomb-throwing anarchist, a twitchy Maine survivalist with a side room full of Xeroxed zines and incendiary devices. He gives the movie a jolt of chaotic energy, the sense that long-term repression can force the drive for freedom to find unexpected, even unsettling outlets—or, put another way, that fighting oppression may mean making common cause with people who kind of freak you out.
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Wright and Bacall give Powell’s Ben a sentimental reason for submitting himself as a Running Man contestant, a wife (Jayme Lawson) and a toddler he wants to give a better life, even if he can’t guarantee he’ll be a part of it. But his real motivation is existential: He’s as mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. When he brings his daughter with him to beg for his construction job back—he has a long history of being fired for insubordination, often after pushing for workers’ rights—it’s not to garner the foreman’s sympathy but to keep himself from bashing the guy’s face in. Powell makes you feel that rage at first, but it slowly ebbs away, at least until Wright gets around to exposing the movie’s real villain. Killian’s to blame, of course, as are the rest of the execs, who’ve despoiled the world and pitted the poor against each other to keep themselves safe. But you can’t give the people what they want if they don’t actually want it. The algorithm doesn’t lie; it just caters to our worst impulses and teaches us to be satisfied as long as they are. The catering is on them, but the settling is on us.
