‘The Running Man’ review: Edgar Wright trips over the finish line

Edgar Wright’s The Running Man starts strong but loses steam, wasting great performances on a tired, recycled message.

For about an hour, The Running Man absolutely sprints. Edgar Wright’s reimagining of the Stephen King novel is alive, it’s breathing fire, it’s revving with all the manic momentum of a filmmaker trying to reassert control of the frame. But then the gears start grinding, the track bends out of shape, and by the final stretch, the movie that once promised jet fuel delivers more of a slow jog. It’s a shame, because the cast is running circles around the material.

In this new version, the game show of death is still the crown jewel of a decaying future. Contestants called “Runners” attempt to survive 30 days while being hunted by professional killers, all for the amusement of a desensitized public. Glen Powell plays Ben Richards, a blue-collar father who volunteers for the carnage to pay for his baby daughter’s medical bills.

The producers only care about ratings, of course. And the audience (the entire world really) actively works against the contestants, reporting them to “Hunters” and betting on their survival like it’s fantasy football. When you win, you live. When you lose, you’re content.

Colman Domingo as Bobby T. in Paramount Pictures’ “THE RUNNING MAN.”

The world’s deadliest reality show.

Wright’s film, co-written with Michael Bacall, feels more King than King of Pop Culture. Gone are the neon-smeared winks and split-diopter montages of Wright’s earlier work. The aesthetic is grimmer, grainier. The cast, however, is anything but muted. Powell crushes it, delivering a tightly coiled, physical performance that carries the entire enterprise. Josh Brolin chews the corporate scenery as a smirking TV “super-producer.” Colman Domingo oozes silky Hunger Games menace, while Lee Pace and William H. Macy have fun lurking at the edges. And then there’s Michael Cera, who shows up, steals a scene or two, and vanishes like some sort of meta-commentary on his acting career.

The idea seems to be bringing King’s book back to its roots. So not Schwarzenegger’s quippy actioner, but a moral panic about media addiction and economic despair. Wright updates the gladiatorial satire for the streaming age, where virality is violence and attention is currency. It’s a killer concept on paper, and the first half executes it beautifully with kinetic chases, grim humor, and the queasy sense that everyone, even the heroes, is complicit in the broadcast.

Running fast, thinking slow.

Just when the film really starts going, the signal drops. The rules of the game keep changing. Not for suspense, but seemingly because the screenplay can’t decide what the rules ever were. Stakes blur, geography collapses, and the momentum flatlines. Wright’s usually razor-sharp editing turns surprisingly anonymous, the choreography serviceable but rarely spectacular. Even Wright’s previous film Last Night in Soho, for all its mess, had that delirious dance sequence you couldn’t look away from. Here, the only thing we’re left staring at is the clock.

Glen Powell, left, and Michael Cera in Paramount Pictures’ “THE RUNNING MAN.”

Because for all its polish and pedigree, The Running Man stumbles hardest when it tries to lecture us. Wright and Bacall lift the book’s moral scaffolding wholesale (the whole “bloodsport as societal mirror” routine), but they don’t build anything new on top of it. Forty years ago, that message was at least somewhat incendiary. Today, it’s screenwriting wallpaper.

After The Hunger Games, Black Mirror, Squid Game, and decades more of media-saturation parables, the idea that we’re addicted to spectacle isn’t exactly a revelation. A story this foundational deserves an update that interrogates how the machine has changed, not just that it still exists. Instead, Wright’s version keeps replaying the same old broadcast, confident the audience won’t notice they’ve seen this rerun before.

The finish line.

By the time The Running Man stumbles into its finale, it’s hard not to wish someone had hit pause around the halfway mark. Powell gives everything, Wright restrains everything, and the movie still manages to overheat itself anyway. It’s not a disaster — more like a fascinating near-miss, a sleek machine that forgets which way the treadmill’s facing. Call it what you want. A remake, a revival, a reboot. But this time, The Running Man could’ve used a little more run and a lot more man.

The Running Man opens in theaters November 14. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Paramount Pictures. 

Jon Negroni

Jon is one of the co-founders of InBetweenDrafts. He hosts the podcasts Thank God for Movies, Mad Men Men, Rookie Pirate Radio, and Fantasy Writing for Barbarians. He doesn’t sleep, essentially.