There is a rage in Edgar Wright’s abysmally bizarre The Running Man. Or at least, there should be. There is in his lead character: Ben Richards (Glen Powell), an out-of-work labourer in a future America surveillance state where reality television and “New Dollars” are the coin of the realm.
Because Ben can’t catch a break. Fired for defiantly attempting to save his coworkers from an on-the-job disaster, Ben is chronically unemployed — bad news for his overworked wife (Jayme Lawson) and sickly infant daughter in serious need of medicine.
There’s only one problem: Ben, frequently described as the angriest man in the world, is in serious need of cash. So, leaving his ratty neighbourhood of Slumside, he finds his way to the affluent side of Co-op City, base of operations for the pseudo-governmental broadcast company Freevee.
Beaming out to nearly every citizen on TVs that, we’re chillingly informed, watch you back, Freevee is sort of like if Spike TV was elected president. By operating a series of game shows that are dubiously ethical at best, Freevee head Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) lives like a king in this retrofuturistic hellscape.
His favourite production is their big earner; the namesake Running Man show he thinks Ben would be just perfect for. A reality tv program whose rules break down simply enough for even the most casual viewer.
WATCH | The Running Man trailer:
As a contestant, just forfeit your ID and other identification markers that allow you to do everything from book a hotel room to buy a bus ticket. Then try to evade and survive the “hunters” hot on your trail for thirty days, armed with sniper rifles, shotguns, switchblades — and a serious hunger for blood.
Oh yeah, and try not to get recognized by the general populace desperate to see you punished for your perceived failures as a member of society. That, to them, would be infinitely more entertaining than seeing the winner’s family get a $1 billion reward, should he somehow manage to survive.
High-concept action
As a setup, it is instantly identifiable; a high concept, television-obsessed dystopia that ticks all the absurdly named, ridiculously costumed boxes of satirical sci-fi.
And the best thing this update to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 Running Man has going for it is its pessimism and absurd creativity; at times lighthearted, and other times cuttingly ironic.
Squint, and you just might be able to imagine that Colman Domingo’s turn as violently voyeuristic TV host Bobby T is an homage to Chris Tucker’s Ruby Rhod in The Fifth Element.
(Ross Ferguson/Paramount Pictures)
But this is in the face of poor storytelling techniques and unlikeable, if not unintelligibly obscure characters. It is a simultaneously reductive and out-of-date takedown of the surveillance state, and a cynical (though not inaccurate) shot across the bow of modern America.
It is a film mixed with a plot so scattered and messy, Ben’s friends and family — ostensibly the motivating force behind all his actions — disappear into the background with a quickness and regularity that suggests they never even mattered at all.
It is a film that doesn’t even bother to introduce one major character until almost the last 15 minutes, but without whom the film would not be able to make its almost painfully shallow point. A film that, like the recent Tron revival, is dressed up in the clothing of futuristic cultural commentary, but removes itself so completely from the original point of its respective franchise that it no longer operates as a critique of anything at all.
To be fair, all of this is framing some genuinely well-done action. Wright, a consummate overstimulation expert, clearly still has all the action-choreography tricks Scott Pilgrim taught him burning a hole in his pocket.
That makes it a brief joy to watch Powell evade the relentless hunters pursuing him through side streets, sewers and seedy apartment buildings. Combine that with a back-half Michael Cera cameo that rivals Rambo in gratuitous violence, and this version of The Running Man may just beat the original as a turn-your-brain-off action romp.
But it’s told with little to no actual connections to a society that’s far more connected to phone screens than TV.
The Running Man tells us that we’re locked in an advertising hellscape, constantly being lied to, manipulated and exploited by its masters. It might be right, but other than a frequently returned to AI-altered video conceit, Wright’s argument comes across as exceptionally tired. And given that its AI component was lifted directly from the original film — likely making it little more than an accidentally prescient topic to return to now — it’s hard to think of this Running Man as anything more than a cribbed version of 1984.
For example: a Kardashian-style reality tv show called The Americanos plays vapidly on everyone’s TVs — a takedown of Co-Op City’s supposedly stupid, self-medicating citizens that may have felt cutting if this were 2010. It all plays into an overdone, oversimplified exposé of a world gone wrong that is as groan-inducing as it is 20 years too late.
Without a strong connection to modern day, any political point The Running Man may have made curdles into inertness. Instead, it operates as a studio-approved rebellion, a safely satirical sci-fi allegory — gently railing against generic evils with such a lack of specificity it becomes basically pointless to talk about them.
Like Jason Statham’s for-profit prison allegory Death Race, Justin Timberlake’s “time is money” capitalism metaphor In Time, or Matt Damon’s border allegory Elysium, it gestures vaguely toward social causes so grand and general it can get away with saying little to nothing about actually solving them. All that’s missing is Kendall Jenner ending racism by offering a cop a Pepsi.
Pithy product placement
It’s almost as if the bad writing itself is a bit; an ironic wink to an audience also engaging in the very same heartless schadenfreude its lead character is running from.
But the way these criticisms are framed feels backwards: there is no subversion of the egregiously stilted writing. There is no trenchantly depressing ending to accurately reflect our situation or innovate the genre. Instead, there’s a Che Guevara-idolizing Michael Cera, capping a Go Get ‘Em monologue with a literal product placement for Monster Energy drinks.
There are two hours of passable action, and a frustratingly undeserved kumbaya, come-together ending — seriously undercutting the whole “detached populace” point the film had been making up until then. It’s a sad portrayal of America meant to chip away at the very industry frameworks holding up a $100 million major studio production.
It’s also solid proof of the fact that you cannot burn down the house from inside the house. You cannot start a revolution from inside the war room. And you cannot make Glen Powell an everyman hero of the people, when those people are the very object of your derision.
In short, we already have The Purge at home, Edgar Wright. No need to dress it up as Battle Royale.
