The Running Man

The Revolution Will Be Televised (But It Will Be Polished)

In 1982, writing under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, Stephen King imagined the year 2025 as a suffocating, corporate-feudalist nightmare where the poor coughed up their lungs and the rich bet on their deaths. It is a cruel irony, then, that when the actual year 2025 arrived, it brought with it Edgar Wright’s adaptation of *The Running Man*—a film that trades the jagged, nihilistic scream of the source material for a kinetic, well-oiled, and ultimately safe cinematic joyride. Wright has made a film that is impossible to hate, but difficult to truly fear.

Wright, a director whose visual vernacular is built on rhythm and wit, approaches this dystopia not with the grime of a documentarian, but with the slickness of a music video. The film looks spectacular. The "Free-V" world is rendered in a suffocating neon gloss, and the camera moves with the frantic energy of a heartbeat in tachycardia. There is a specific, breathless sequence in the second act—where Glen Powell’s Ben Richards vaults through the crumbling infrastructure of "Slumside" while pursued by Lee Pace’s terrifying, masked Evan McCone—that reminds us why Wright is one of our great action geographers. Every spatial relationship is clear; every punch lands on the beat. It is a masterclass in motion.

Yet, this technical perfection is also the film’s ideological undoing. King’s novel was about a man who was already dead, running through a world that wanted him to suffer. Glen Powell, charismatic to a fault, plays Richards not as a desperate, emaciated rat cornered by the state, but as a movie star in a dirt-smudged henley. When he stares down the camera, we don't see a man contemplating the abyss; we see a hero plotting a sequel. Powell is excellent, anchoring the film with a seething, physical vulnerability, but the script (co-written by Wright and Michael Bacall) constantly cushions his falls. The decision to alter the novel’s devastating, suicidal ending—swapping a plane crash of ultimate defiance for a more palatable, "Hollywood" victory—feels like a betrayal of the story's punk-rock ethos. It turns a tragedy about the cost of resistance into a fable about winning the game.

The supporting cast, however, finds the grotesque humanity in the margins. Josh Brolin, as the producer Dan Killian, is a reptilian delight, embodying the banality of evil with a smile that suggests he checked his soul at the door decades ago. But it is Michael Cera as the tech-savvy rebel Elton who provides the film’s surprising emotional ballast. In a role that could have been a throwaway gag, Cera finds a quiet, trembling rage that feels more authentic to the source material than the main plot. His sacrifice is the one moment where the film’s stakes feel dangerously real, where the gloss cracks to reveal the blood underneath.

Ultimately, *The Running Man* suffers from a crisis of identity. It wants to be a satire of media consumption, yet it is so entertaining that it becomes the very "content" it mocks. We are invited to jeer at the bloodthirsty studio audience on screen, even as we munch our popcorn and cheer for the violence. Wright has crafted a superior blockbuster, a breathless chase movie that hums with precision engineering. But in smoothing over the rough edges of Bachman’s despair, he has left us with a rebellion that feels curated, tested, and approved for all audiences. We are entertained, certainly. But are we awake?