Review: The Running Man (2025)

Director:  Edgar Wright

Stars:  Colman Domingo, Josh Brolin, Glen Powell

It’s evident throughout this remake – and it was probably self-evident beforehand – that Edgar Wright has a healthy love for the Arnie-starring, meat-headed first run-through helmed by Paul Michael Glaser back in 1987. Wright, along with his screenwriting buddy Michael Bacall, have made some tweaks to the material in order to help it chime more substantively with America’s present climate, but the truth is that a lot of the Big Themes that The Running Man toys with were there in the original text and have only become more pertinent. 

Blacklisted resident of the ‘Slumside’ district of Co-Op City, Ben Richards (Glen Powell) is a preternaturally angry man who, desperate to afford the medication needed to keep his infant daughter alive, submits to the Free Vee Network to appear on one of its degrading gameshows that pit the desperate against insurmountable, humiliating or outright painful odds. The ‘worst’ of these is the titular show, in which lucky contestants have to survive 30 days on the run across America, dogged by professional Hunters, but also at the mercy of the country’s poor, eager to rat the Runners out for cash rewards. Richards is prepared to go on any other gameshow, but network exec Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) sees his potential as a TV sensation and funnels him into an iconic red jumpsuit for a nationwide game of hide and seek. 

Originally written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, Stephen King is now the named author of the source as well as an exec producer. The Running Man is a sci-fi piece that shares many traits with his other high-concept reality TV nightmare brought to screens this year; The Long Walk. Both pit penniless Americans against one another in a homicidal competition that a braying (but mostly unseen) public is hooked upon. Both are games rigged in the favour of the governing bodies that perpetuate them. And both see an underdog use them as an opportunity for televised political revolt. 

Wright’s best decision here is to dispense with the hazily-realised arenas of combat that typified the Arnie outing for a wider manhunt among the people. It affords him the opportunity to play more flexibly in the realms of the cat’n’mouse thriller. Wright’s bonhomie to the original is evident in both the chunky tech and gruff, sardonic tone, making this movie feel like a funhouse reflection of its forbearer. It feels as though he’s taken some notes from Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, too. His staging of action and suspense has toughened and tightened, all for the good. So much so, in fact, that he gets away with effectively staging one great set piece twice, as Richards darts up and down two old buildings when he’s suddenly cornered by Killian’s relentless goons. 

The Running Man is at its strongest whenever Richards gains support from the community. Quite by accident, one suspects, Wright’s film chimes with Paul Thomas Anderson’s call-to-activism One Battle After Another and is at its most optimistic whenever it foregrounds a downtrodden populous committed to affecting social change. If the present American zeitgeist is Enough Is Enough, Wright shows a savvy awareness of this. 

It’s a shame, then, that much of the movie’s bite and energy dissipates come a seemingly endless third act. It isn’t her fault, but right around the time Emilia Jones’ media-warped Amelia cruises blithely into the narrative, The Running Man traps itself in two long vehicular-based sequences that it seems loathe to leave. Maybe Amelia is simply introduced too late into the narrative, but she brings with her a curious fatigue that makes the script’s lumpen choices all the more noticeable. The ol’ “I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards” jibe from Garth Marenghi is particularly apt here. The Running Man beats you over the head relentlessly with its Fake News through-line, or leans on underwhelming revelations we’ve already figured out. It’s wearying. Throw on top an apparent indecisiveness over how to end this thing, and Wright not only fails to stick the landing, he doesn’t even show it. 

There are a lot of positives here. Wright seems to have calmed down on a lot of the egocentric tics that have dogged his movies since he started out, and seems more focused on making his storytelling immersive. The cast bring a great deal of hammy enthusiasm, particularly Colman Domingo as The Running Man‘s sensational (and sensationalist) host Bobby T and Michael Cera doing… whatever it is he’s doing. Even Powell manages to skirt around his character’s one-note anger management issues to deliver something vaguely charming without getting too smug about it. But this is a fundamentally over-long, over-loud affair. It goes gang-busters for a good 90 minutes but then runs out of steam, and is left yelling relentlessly like an exhaustive YouTube rant, shouting into the void. In line with our much-criticised attention spans and quick-fix bloodlust, the desire to change the channel only escalates.