The low bar for 21st century remakes of Arnie vehicles by directors who spent their formative years in videoshops was set by Len Wiseman's 12A-rated Total Recall of 2012, a colossal squandering of resources that not even ITV2 has much bothered to revive in the years since. (Why bother scheduling that, when you can stick the grabby and exhilarating original on again?) The latest rethink of The Running Man, nothingburger though it ultimately is, clears that sorry hurdle, in large part because co-writer/director Edgar Wright grasps what made Paul Michael Glaser's 1987 film such a home-rental mainstay. As Stephen King framed it all along, this is one man against the media-industrial complex; a blue-collar protagonist so badly snookered by the system he feels compelled to sign up for a murderous reality TV extravaganza - in which contestants are pursued across America by gun-toting terminators and a general public whipped into a baying mob - so as to care for his sick child. In 2025, there may be no reason to tinker radically with that premise. Wright has a bigger budget at his disposal than Glaser ($110m, as opposed to $27m); it buys him more production design, hundreds of extras, big fucking explosions. (Oddly, the world it builds hews closer to Arnie's Total Recall.) And Glen Powell's hero Ben Richards is angrier than one recalls Arnie ever being: pissed off at his bosses, the system, the format of the show, smirking showrunner Killian (Josh Brolin), his fellow contestants, perhaps even himself, he's obliged to figure out some way to focus, weaponise and monetise that rage on the run. In the future, King and Wright propose, everything will be hyped to the max, and everyone will be vastly more agitated for it. This, at least, scans.
Even so, persisting with television as the enemy feels like a very 20th century position for the new film to take. I mean, yes, whole stations broadcasting fake news 24/7 probably will radicalise your grandma, and Wright also massages some tacky, Kardashians-like flaunting of dynastic wealth into the show's adbreaks. But as noted by a rather more timely (not to mention distinctively 21st century) variation on this theme, the Korean hit Squid Game, it's the Internet that's now making the world worse faster; a show like Naked and Afraid starts to seem almost quaint when set against the cash-in-hand predations of Mr. Beast. While Wright's film dashes briskly enough between setpieces, as satire and/or social critique, this Running Man remains wholly insubstantial. This is a B movie where the B stands for bubblegum: you slop it in your holes, chew it over for a bit, realise it's rapidly losing its flavour, and then dispose of it altogether easily. Powell's aggressively one-note performance suggests this isn't the star for which some people have been so desperately looking; I spent most of the running time lamenting how the one true star turn of the autumn movie season - Channing Tatum's in Roofman - has gone so inexplicably underseen. Around him, Wright casts familiar and welcome faces - David Zayas, William H. Macy, Katy O'Brian, Lee Pace (eyebrows muffled under a balaclava, which in itself seems a waste) - only to give each of these participants almost nothing of lasting interest to do.
Unlike in the honourably bleak The Long Walk, which has (somewhat surprisingly) emerged as the year's strongest King derivative, zero dramatic weight is accrued in the picking off of the hero's fellow runners; the racial aspects of Wright's film are so cursory they make One Battle After Another seem James Baldwin-rigorous. The source was a neat idea briskly executed, but more airport novel than a piercing state-of-the-nation address. This adaptation, recognisably a byproduct of a delulu industry that still believes there's something to be gained from returning to all things Hunger Games, slaps an A-movie budget on a B-picture premise and hands it to a creative who encountered the original at a formative moment and afforded it greater import than it merits. That premise cries out for taut and nasty handling; instead, Wright's fondness for goofy asides - the kind of sidebar gags he'd cut away to in Spaced and the Cornetto trilogy - gradually removes that premise of its urgency. That this version still runs to 133 minutes seems born less of narrative necessity than of a willingness to keep filming until the money had been spent, Powell had huffed and puffed around every last one of the sets constructed for the occasion, and each of those big fucking explosions had been set off. The result? So-so multiplex timekiller, no better or worse than the first adaptation; another shrug from a system prepared to splash vastly more cash to achieve much the same middling effects. It's not worth getting Ben Richards-angry about, but a system that thinks like this doesn't deserve any big autumn hits.
The Running Man is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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