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| Title: | The Running Man |
| Year: | 2025 |
| Genre: | SciFi action |
| IMDb: | link |
| RT: | link |
Note: This is a spoiler free review other than two minor spoilers (one of them regarding the ending) both of which are well-signposted below, and each of which can easily be skipped by going straight to the following paragraph as soon as you see the warning.
The Running Man (2025) is Edgar Wright's long-awaited adaptation of the eponymous novel by Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman. However, given that it is the second such adaptation, following the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The Running Man (1987), it also needs to contend with being a remake of this campy but still much-beloved movie, which is quite the baggage to carry, considering that the original novel was a grim and gritty dystopian tale of fingernail-biting suspense, and the new adaptation, at least according to its press releases, aimed to honour its source material, which is something that cannot be said for the 1987 version. The Arnie film is very much an Arnie film, and no doubt pleases many an Arnie fan, but has so little to do with its own source material that one has to wonder if anyone in the production ever bothered to even read it. The similarities between page and screen versions are not even enough to fill up a blurb.
Between the combination of Edgar Wright's excellent directorial track record, the large production budget, and the promise to finally appease King fans by creating an adaptation to this novel that honours its source material, expectations for this one were sky high. This, of course, only made the Internet all the more venomous when the film ultimately opened and proved less than the sum of its parts.
So, how is it really? Well, not as good as I had hoped, but also not as bad as I had feared having read the film's savage reviews. It's a competently written, competently directed, honest attempt at a good adaptation.
This is not to say that I don't acknowledge any of the criticisms levelled against the film. For example, I think Glen Powell has rightfully been decried as not having the range for what is required of him here, which makes us root for him in the beginning, but tire of him as the film wears on and he is revealed as a one-note actor.
But the brunt of the blame should not be placed at Powell's doorstep. Frankly, I think history will show that this was yet another case of studio interference, but be that as it may the direct cause is simple: the film tries to serve too many masters all at once.
Explicitly, the film tries to juggle all of the following, making it inevitable that some of these juggled apples will end up on the floor:
With the above impossible constraints in mind, I think Wright and everyone involved made just about the best film they could have made. It tries to follow King's plot-line beginning to end, but feels no reverence towards it. Just about every confrontation in the book has been revamped, to create an "equivalent" set-piece, which is more visual and cinematic, and which spells out its themes more (for the laundry-folding audience) and provides more action (for the Arnie fans)—and that is fine... except that it dilutes the heart of the original to the point that one can no longer be emotionally invested in it.
Arnie's Ben Richards needed to only survive one night in "The Running Man" program. Powell's needs to live through 30 days, same as in King's version, but in King's version that was the whole point, and made us see the exhaustion and desperation. It simply cannot work if it is also an action flick, filled with one-line zingers.
One of my favourite moments in the original story is when Ben Richards discovers that the hunters chasing him are cheating, and he learns how to undermine their cheating, winning himself a few precious days while the hunters reveal themselves as incapable of hunting anyone without breaking the rules of their own game. We are, for one moment, discovering how desperate they become when the game is turned on its head.
By contrast, in Wright's adaptation the hunters are fully capable at any given time to kill Richards, but choose not to do so for the sake of ratings. As Powell's Richards better understands his situation, instead of things becoming more tense, they become more contrived and meaningless, to the point that he at one point (WARNING: Minor spoiler here. Skip to the next paragraph if you want to avoid it.) effectively gives himself up to his chasers, knowing they will not do anything to him because "It isn't prime-time yet". (The original novel portrays this in a far more sophisticated scene, involving an active confrontation between civilian onlookers with video cameras and the police. The only reason I can think of that the filmmakers decided to replace that tightly written scene with this lame excuse is because the original, perhaps, felt too real, too close to comfort in an America where police brutality is a thing, and civilian cameras have really exposed some cops at their worst, an America where riots have been known to ensue over just such things... But, you see, you can't have your cake and eat it, too: you can't both be a serious, relevant film about real issues and, simultaneously, shrink back when the discussion becomes uncomfortable. When the film tries to do so, it only exposes its own hypocrisy, and its already-diluted message becomes laughable.)
My personal belief is that it is choices such as these, which fundamentally misunderstand the tone and method of the original—not the misguided casting of Glen Powell—that make the second half of the story such a slog, in comparison with its kinetic start, and that make the film as a whole lose its momentum: the film sets itself up as a one-man-army action flick, but then fizzles out when it becomes an overlong struggle (and the protagonist realises he doesn't have to fight to survive and, in fact, is sure to lose if he tries) instead of positioning itself from the go as a tale of survival, which would have only upped the ante the more it gets drawn out.
And then comes the end, and instead of King's original iconic (and completely unfilmable) ending, they had to do something and, following the example set out throughout the entire film end up handling this by trying to please everyone and ultimately pleasing no one. (WARNING: Again, minor spoilers here. Skip to the next paragraph if you want to avoid them.) They acknowledge the original ending for the King fans, they provide a meaningless and entirely unbelievable action-based resolution for the Arnie fans, they swing tones erratically trying to remind the viewers of the heady themes, the lighter delivery and the self-aware humour, and ultimately even try to patch all this into an even more unbelievable fairy tale ending.
They take all of the notes regarding all of the many things this film wants to be, and try to make them all coexist in one scene and it just doesn't work. It can't work.
One specific aspect that I would like to highlight, where the "meta" aspect of the film shines clearly, albeit inadvertently, is the crowd reactions. In the original, the crowd is a character and behaves as believably as any other character. We know what the crowd knows (although the crowd doesn't know all we know) and we understand exactly where their reactions are coming from. In Wright's adaptation, repeatedly someone (Killian, Richards, etc.) will say something like "If you do this, the audience will ...", and, lo and behold, in the next scene the crowd does exactly that, completely forgetting who they were rooting for only seconds earlier, and why. We, who know what the crowd knows, quickly stop believing this. When Dan Killian says what the crowd is about to do, completely contradicting our own common sense, he doesn't feel like a genius super-producer. He feels like he's completely out of touch. And when the crowd in the film actually does what the plot expects it to, like puppets on a string, we, the audience, not only lose our empathy with them, who are to some degree our avatars in this fictional world—or if not avatars, at least our counterparts in the allegory—but we feel, as spectators, that Edgar Wright is just as out of touch as Dan Killian, who is Wright's counterpart. The irony of the film's director casting himself as the antagonist is paid off by the fact that just like Killian holds all the cards but (we know in our heart of hearts) cannot win, the same is true for Wright: he had $100 million to bring to life whatever vision he chose for this film, but it was impossible for him to win.
Bottom line: this is a very well-made film by people who know what they are doing and are at the top of their craft. It did not deserve the hate that it got, and especially its first half is highly entertaining. But it does have its share of problems, mostly around trying to do too much without deciding on any one direction. Edgar Wright has managed tonal swings in the past (see, e.g., Baby Driver (2017)) but, as a director—literally the person whose job it is to "direct" the film—he should have known better than to try it here. Each such tonal inconsistency is a moment in which the viewer is taken out of the narrative. This is a very dangerous thing to do. It is especially dangerous in genres like SciFi and high action, where the suspense of belief in the fictitious world and its rules is the only thing that makes the story works. As is, not only is the film tonally inconsistent, it is tonally inconsistent in so many different ways, and switches continuously throughout its entire run-time, to the point that, as a viewer, there is just no way to stay invested in it. (It would have been possible, I think, for the film to survive a single tonal switch, between a frantic action-oriented first half and a more intellectually-driven SciFi concluding half, but this is not what we actually got.)
If it hadn't been for the film's ending, which takes all these problems and ratchets them up to 11, it would have still been a problematic film, which many would have walked away from with dissatisfaction, but it would have been a passable entry in Edgar Wright's oeuvre, and, I think, an overall enjoyable film. I gave it 3 out 4 stars with that in mind: with consideration of the viewing experience of a hypothetical viewer who, let's say, was forced to leave the cinema about 5 minutes before the film's end. I think such a viewer would have said that the film was a blast, and that they just want to get back to the theatre and see its epic conclusion. I know I would have. But having actually seen the ending, one comes out of the theatre feeling that one's time has been wasted. And that is a shame.