The Running Man will be released in theaters on November 14.
If you’re trying to make a new adaptation of a Stephen King book that’s also a kind-of remake of a cult sci-fi classic from Arnold Schwarzenegger ’80s heyday, you might end up a kind-of child of two worlds. Edgar Wright’s version of The Running Man aims to do just that, but the trick with trying to hit the center of a Venn diagram is that you might accidentally end up in the middle of the road.
The Running Man of 2025 is the product of a few iterations that came before it. Most of its DNA is from the Stephen King novel from his days in the early ’80s using the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It was a heady piece of speculative sci-fi that’s dark and brooding without a lot of room for hope. But The Running Man is also an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from 1987, the glory days of campy one-liner action flicks that left most of the meat of their source material off the screen (see also, Total Recall) in favor of a little extra flash and sizzle. Now, all of this makes The Running Man primed for a revisiting but it also makes the latest version of the story difficult to talk about out of context of the book and previous film. On one hand there’s the much darker source material that this movie is trying to honor in ways Arnold’s ’80s version didn’t come close to, but on the other hand there’s a fun action movie that needs to happen in there somewhere. Balancing these two factors is where The Running Man doesn’t quite keep up.
There is plenty in the movie that works though. For starters, there’s Glen Powell. The guy is one of the biggest stars on the rise at the moment and his performance in The Running Man isn’t going to change anybody’s mind about that. This is effectively his first time out as a proper leading man action hero and it suits him for the most part. He tops off his anger-forward take on Ben Richards with just the right amount of vulnerability. It’s the thing that Harrison Ford made his whole career on. Strong and capable and all of that, but also not trying to hide the fact that he’s in over his head. I think I like the cockier-than-he-deserves-to-be version of Glen Powell, the one from Top Gun: Maverick and Twisters, a little more than this angry everyman, but he still does a solid job.
But for me personally, my experience watching The Running Man was another lesson in coming in too hot. I have been crazy excited to see this movie since it was announced. Edgar Wright directing this specific movie at this specific time felt almost too specifically perfect. It ticked all my boxes, so the film had a lot to live up to, fair or not. And while his signature is still on parts of this movie, I think it was missing a full dose of Edgar Wright.
The title sequence for example is full of slick shots that very effectively communicate a lot of information visually. There’s one in the trailer, with Ben walking through the street past a line of people waiting for a chance to buy medicine. It’s great movement and blocking and composition and it tells a story all by itself. It’s vintage Edgar Wright. The drone shot following Ben through the halls of a building the hunters have him trapped in is another one like that. The move is not for movement’s sake; it’s rooted in the TV broadcast the film is portraying and there’s a motivation to swoop and dive through the halls that’s both cool to look at and furthers the story. It’s that kind of visual language that’s made Edgar Wright one of my favorites. But it’s also the sort of storytelling that only happens in fits and spurts throughout the film, with Wright’s fingerprints not really being too visible for most of the movie.
I will say, though, the other real standout in the cast is Colman Domingo, who is having an absolute blast as Bobby Thompson, the ringmaster to The Running Man’s circus. For every bit of the film’s color palette that feels a little drab, going from a gray and imposing near-future dystopian city to the brown and barren countryside, there’s a sparkly jacket draped over Bobby Thompson. Domingo’s a bright spot to be sure, and serves an important function for the movie. He’s heartless enough to write off the hardships the runners have to endure and the lies that he’s telling about them to stir up the masses with a “hey, that’s showbiz, babe” cockiness. But he’s also savvy enough to navigate the dangerous waters he’s swimming in. Plus he’s charming as hell and looks incredible. He’s a ton of fun deployed in exactly the right way.
There are also a ton of great details in the production design that flesh out the world. Little things like a gender-swapped, pin-up girl version “Auntie Sam” on the cover of a magazine and a fun Easter egg about who’s on the New Dollar bills depict a society given over to its baser instincts. They’re a smart brand of throw-away jokes that try to keep the mood light where they can.
But that’s also the biggest issue with The Running Man of 2025. Thematically, it seems to work against itself sometimes. Like I mentioned up top, there’s a danger when you don’t pick a lane that you might end up in the middle of the road. King’s novel was bleak science fiction that went hard, Schwarzenegger’s film was a campy explosion of satire, and Wright’s version is a little of both but not fully either one. My read is that it’s a movie doing three things well enough, but not doing any of them as well as it could have had it just focused on one of them.
First of all, it’s not bombastic or absurd enough to feel like a proper, biting satire. For sci-fi satire to really work, you need to create a little bit of distance between the work and the real world. The Running Man 2025’s near-future dystopia is a little too near to the present to have a lot of fun with. It’s a world of enormous wealth inequality, health crises and authoritarian governments that doesn’t just feel “dangerously possible” like it did when King first wrote about it 40 years ago so much as “uncomfortably familiar.” So the film’s conceit feels a little too mundane to cast our current society in a different, more questioning light like a truly effective satire should do.
Secondly, on the opposite side of the coin, it’s not subtle enough to work as a thrilling melodrama. Every time the film gets heavy, they double down on the weight. Like I said, the world of Co-Op City on screen is a dark one, filled with every kind of problem we’re currently facing, from affordable medicine to deep fakes lying to us. They’re the kind of problems that deserve some weight. When Powell’s Ben Richards goes to an intense “this is about my family” place of earnestness, however, there’s no release valve on it. Michael Cera has a moment of lightness in the middle of everybody’s despair during his brief stint in the movie, but it comes and goes pretty quickly.
I think you can see the thriller part of this movie not fully working in Josh Brolin’s villain, Dan Killian. As a network executive tasked with distracting the masses with a modern gladiator arena with a more open-world flavor, he’s a solid son of a bitch who’s easy to hate, bright white veneers and all. But by the time he has his inevitable come-apart, I didn’t really buy it. There wasn’t much of an arch to his villainy that might have been there had he been able to have as much fun as Colman Domingo was having chewing up some scenery. Either way, had Killian arrived at the end of his story in a bit more of a believable way, I think the whole film would’ve been classed up a bit.
Thirdly, I don’t think the action is inventive enough to make The Running Man really sing as an action film. There are fun set pieces for sure, the aforementioned drone shot for one, and the big bridge explosion from the trailers is another, but it’s hard out there to make an action movie memorably action-forward these days, and I don’t think The Running Man quite gets there. And this in particular is not a foreign idea to Edgar Wright’s work. Take Baby Driver, for example. It was a good enough excuse to make incredible car chases. I actually couldn’t tell you much about that movie outside of, “Loved the car chases, I bet they had fun making it.” I don’t think the action in The Running Man has that kind of staying power.
Ultimately, this is a movie that wants to have sharp teeth. The subject matter deserves them and Glen Powell’s performance as an angry everyman becoming a reluctant revolutionary icon does as well. The statements Stephen King made more than four decades ago about the fickle nature of truth in the media and mass consumption and unequal distribution of wealth are every bit as relevant today as they were back then, so they ought to be taken seriously. The story of The Running Man, in all of its now three iterations, is a great piece of sci-fi that I, for one, really enjoy. I’m glad it’s being retold. Edgar Wright’s film seems to be caught in-between two very different versions of it.
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