Edgar Wright has been one of my favorite directors. This British filmmaker is known for his fast-paced, kinetic action sequences, for satirizing genres, and for making great use of popular music as soundtracks for his films. His Cornetto trilogy of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and World’s End is still a delight to watch. With Shaun, he satirized the zombie film, while Fuzz took on the buddy cop genre. More recently, he directed and wrote Baby Driver, and also took on a psychological horror film with Last Night in SoHo.

So, I set a high bar for his films, and I was already getting weird vibes when I read that he would adapt Stephen King’s The Running Man. King wrote this under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and earlier in the year, a film adaptation of another Bachman novel, The Long Walk, was released as Bachman and King would write nihilistic, dark comedy stories that worked as social commentary of a bleak kind. The Long Walk was consistent with this tone, and it worked beautifully - some say that the film is even better than the overlong, repetitive novel.

With the Running Man, you’re also contending with the first film adaptation that starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, and came out in 1987. King himself panned that film for deviating so much from the original material. Here, Wright did have more respect for the novel, but my nagging question was more of the nature of whether he was the right kind of Director for this film. On the surface, it would seem so; as he could do magic with the action bits, plus revel in the irony and dark shafts of comedy.

The film takes place in some dystopian near-future and centers on a game show called The Running Man. Contestants try to evade deadly hunters, and if they survive for thirty days, they win $1 billion. It’s Hunger Games, exciting, and turned into a nationwide manhunt with so much money at stake.

The cast includes Glen Powell, William Macy, Lee Pace, Michael Cera, Emilia Jones, Jayme Lawson, Colman Domingo, and Josh Brolin. Chung-hoon Chung provides cinematography. And to be honest, this is really a Glen Powell vehicle - as Ben Richards, he’s the lasting character of the film, as it’s so episodic. Josh Brolin plays the Running Man show’s producer, Dan Killian, but it’s his jaw that does most of the acting. As the show host, Bobby Thompson, Colman Domingo makes more of an effort by going over the top. And as far as cameos are concerned, let’s salute Michael Cera and Emilia Jones - their characters both hold much promise but are either short-lived or come on too late in the film.

It’s fun for an audience looking for cheap thrills and kicks, and with the popularity of Glen Powell, this film may actually kill at the box office. But is it a good Edgar Wright film? I’d say it isn’t because he can’t seem to decide on the tone of the film; it keeps changing its mind on whether it’ll be outrageous deadpan satire/dark comedy or an earnest trampled man rising above his circumstances narrative. As a result, it’s neither here nor there, and the sad part is that even the action sequences don’t pop like how they did in Baby Driver.

This is one Running Man that should have stopped and decided what it was running for!