Female Film Critics 24/375
Imaging a dystopian future marked by economic inequality, Stephen King wrote The Running Man back in 1982 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Set in futuristic America, its hero Ben Richards is so desperate for money to buy medicine for his sick two year-old daughter that he volunteers for the Games Network, a Free-Vee reality television channel in which despairing people compete for monetary prizes.
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The Running Man feels like it’s several steps behind the times. Despite a few good performances, this updated remake of the 1987 original is essentially a 1980’s action movie with capable action but sorely in need of biting satire. Glen Powell steps into the running shoes Arnold Schwarzenegger laced on in the earlier version, an adaptation of a Stephen King short story about a bread-and-circuses world of brutal competitions that distracts the masses from their misery. Yet while Powell is up to the task—and believably more in peril than, let’s face it, Arnold would ever be—the film feels tired straigh out of the starting blocks. That’s largely because the cutthroat world it shows, while perhaps prescient in 1987, has been skewered better ever since.
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