The movie opens with Glen Powell’s character, Ben Richards, carrying his feverish two-year-old baby into the office of his former supervisor, asking for his old job back. We discover that he stood up for his buddies in a dispute, caused trouble for the company, and got himself blacklisted. When the supervisor throws Ben out and berates him for bringing his daughter to lay on a guilt trip, Ben corrects him, saying he brought her along to, and I’m paraphrasing here, “keep from cracking your head open.” Then, as he leaves, he sees a recruitment ad for the Running Man game show, but assures his little girl that her daddy isn’t that crazy.
Glen Powell stars in Paramount Pictures 'The Running Man' (Images courtesy of Paramount Pictures International)
It's a cold open that works and is a perfect on-point introduction to our hero. No dilly-dallying, no taking the time to let the audience breathe and take in the world, or any of that. You know exactly what kind of person Ben is; you know exactly what he’s willing to do.
Ben meets with Dan Killian, a studio exec and producer of the Running Man show played in deliciously calculating fashion by Josh Brolin. Killian thinks Ben’s story is rated gold, while Ben only really wants to survive long enough to get his daughter treatment with actual meds and get them out of the slums.
This iteration adheres more closely to the source material than the 1980s movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, which presented a more colorful and lighter take on Stephen King’s novel. This version, directed by Edgar Wright and written by Wright and Scott Pilgrim Against the World collaborator Michael Bacall, is not quite as cartoonish or campy, but still over-the-top at times.
A stand-out in the whole movie is Colman Domingo, who plays the show’s host, the salesman peddling gore and suffering to the unwashed masses disguised as justice and the American way. He is the preacher proclaiming the truth of the network, that if you want to forget your worries and be a true citizen, all you need to do is tune in at 8:00 PM. Think of him as a more forceful version of Stanley Tucci’s Ceasar Flickerman from The Hunger Games. Domingo lays it on thick, and you can tell he’s enjoying every minute of it.
At its core, Running Man is an action movie. It is almost as if the crew has no choice in the matter, as people will intuitively expect it to be a remake of the Schwarzenegger film, and not an adaptation of the book. In that sense, there’s no escaping its ’80s action roots. And while the action is there, and there’s quite a bit of it, part of me wished they leaned into it a bit more.
Josh Brolin
On the other hand, the movie is about many more pressing issues, and the genius of it all is that you don’t need to do much digging beneath the surface. Talk about show and not tell, it is all in your face, starting from frame one.
From Ben’s plight to the long line of hopefuls trying to get onto a game show in a desperate attempt at making some money (I can’t help but recall that there was a time in our own country that a game or variety show could grant you a life-changing win), to the fact that citizens are encouraged to report or terminate the runners for cash, the movie does not shy away from depicting moral decay.
And a game show where people are brutally hunted down and killed for entertainment? That’s also a sharp jab at the state of today’s media landscape if I ever saw one. How far are we from this modern twist on the gladiators who give their lives for the cheer of the crowd in the Roman Colosseum? There are already reality shows that seem designed to bring out the worst in the contestants, encouraging lies, backstabbings, and betrayals. Is it really such a leap?
Powell’s Ben is more of an everyman, and I believe he is meant to be, as we see how things work in this twisted world through his eyes. And this is perhaps the biggest takeaway from the film. That his world is not that far from our own, what he sees, we see every day. The unconscionably uneven distribution of wealth, corporate greed, moral degradation, and all-around general apathy toward our fellow man are all taking place right now, and just like Ben, who finds his Mockingjay moment, the movie asks us what we think about all this and what we are going to do about it.