In a dystopian United Stated, three contestants compete in a reality TV show to survive against the Hunters, a team of deadly assassins. If they survive for 30 days, they win $1 billion “New Dollars,” which is the currency used in Edgar Wright’s new film The Running Man. As part of their contract, contestants must record daily straight-to-cameras for a public that is baying for blood. But there’s a catch; the show’s producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) and host Bobby Thompson (Colman Domingo) don’t play fair. They doctor the footage to depict the contestants as murderous thugs and the Hunters as patriotic heroes. Enter Glen Powell as contestant Ben Richards, a muscular, impoverished husband and father struggling to afford life-saving medication for his daughter, sick with common flu. Can he win The Running Man?

Who cares? Powell and everyone else in Edgar Wright’s remake of the 1987 original are spectacularly dull. We’re told Powell’s character is the angriest contestant to ever appear on the show. Powell depicts this anger through scowls and purposeful-walking. Otherwise, he generates zero pathos for his character’s bland predicament and somehow even fewer laughs, lacking any semblance of the country swagger of Twisters, or the obnoxious but fuckable flyboy of Top Gun: Maverick. Powell’s failure emphasises just how well Arnold Schwarzenegger anchored these silly movies back in the 80s and 90s.

But we should also blame the script, written by Wright and Michael Bacall, which – without justification – is much more faithful to Stephen King’s novel than the 1987 original. It includes all of King’s non-essential story elements, such as the leaden wife and sick-kid motivation for Richards, and it’s all the worse for it. The old Running Man wisely ditched all that, instead making Schwarzenegger’s Richards a bad-ass soldier framed for the murder of innocent civilians. You know, proper 80s-set-up shit.

But then, none of Wright’s choices here entertain. Visually, he replaces the garish, gory spandex colours of Paul Michael Glaser’s original with that dusty, CG-laden grain of Ready Player One. Wright also doubles down on the frenetic edits, cuts and whip pans he’s known for, but none of it aids the storytelling, which becomes increasingly incoherent as the contest limps along. The final sequence, set on a cartoonish stealth bomber and involving evermore double-crosses, fake reveals and doppelganger characters, is loud without being interesting. Somehow, despite the budget and personnel, even the action scenes are not good.

Does The Running Man at least say something about our hypnotised, desensitised population? Maybe, but so has every second film released this year. It’s true enough that the media can manipulate us into wild partisan swings. Yes, it’s true that late-stage capitalism pits us against each other, prioritising our capacities to destroy each other rather than work together. But Wright buries any potency in these concepts under an avalanche of noise and edits, such that they lose all resonance. The result, rather than Verhoevenian satire, is an aggravating mess. Luckily, a far superior adaptation of a Stephen King novel about a survival contest set in a dystopian future already came out about three months ago. I recommend you see that instead.

 

The Running Man opens today in cinemas.