Full-tilt chase sequences, a punk aesthetic and a sugar-rush soundtrack, means there is plenty of enjoyment to be had as Edgar Wright goes back to King’s original 1982 novel
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dgar Wright, that unstoppable force for good in cinema, has revived the sci-fi thriller satire last seen in 1987 with Arnold Schwarzenegger; it now stars Glen Powell and is adapted directly from the original 1982 novel written by Stephen King under his “Richard Bachman” pen-name, a futurist nightmare set in that impossibly distant year of 2025. The resulting film is never anything but likable and fun – though never actually disturbing in the way that it’s surely supposed to be and the ending is fudged and anticlimactic.
Yet there’s plenty of enjoyment to be had. Wright accelerates to a sprint for some full-tilt chase sequences; there’s a nice punk aesthetic with protest ’zines being produced by underground rebels; and Wright always delivers those sugar-rush pop slams on the soundtrack, including, of course, the Spencer Davis Group’s Keep on Running. It’s a quirk of fate that The Running Man arrives in the same year as The Long Walk, also from a King book: a similar idea, only it’s walking not running.
Powell plays Ben, an honest, hardworking guy in a dystopian US run by a faceless corporation in the traditional manner. He can’t get work after being blacklisted for calling out unsafe practices but desperately needs cash to buy medicine for his sick daughter. His wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) is moreover exploited at the club where she works as a waitress-slash-hostess, although King’s original novel is clearer about the distasteful things she needs to do to earn money. In despair, Ben signs up for a top-rated reality TV show called The Running Man; he has to go on the run across the US, hunted by professional killers, and if he can survive for 30 days, he gets a billion dollars. But all too late, he realises that these shark-like fascist TV execs aren’t going to play fair.
