There’s something vaguely superior about most dystopian movies. We can all point to terrible events and modes of thinking in our current world and convince ourselves things are only going to get worse—that’s easy. But when a filmmaker puts his most dismal vision for our collective future onscreen, we’re somehow supposed to pretend these terrible premonitions could never have occurred to little old us, instead hailing them as a feat of imaginative brilliance. An authoritarian government that sponsors ruthless reality TV shows in which desperate individuals compete for cash to pay their basic medical bills? That sounds pretty awful. But in 2025, it’s not really that far-fetched, and any action thriller built around an idea like that needs to be mechanically sound, and thrilling, by itself.
The Running Man, directed by Edgar Wright and adapted from Stephen King’s 1982 novel of the same name, is dark all right. It’s also garishly obvious, and though it grabs for laughs here and there, it has almost zero wit. Glen Powell plays Ben Richards, an honest working man trying to hold his family together in a futuristic hellhole dystopia. He’s just lost his grim factory job—there’s an allusion to some sacrifice he’s made for his coworkers, though he also has an anger-management problem—and his baby is very sick. His wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson), works grueling hours as a waitress at a sleazy club for gross rich guys, the only place she can make any money, though the couple still doesn’t have enough to procure the “real” drugs that will save their daughter. In this grim futureworld, only useless, fake medications are available to the poor—everything else is out of reach.
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Ben is out of options, which is why he decides to try out for one of those sadistic government-sponsored game shows; he’s so fit and hunky and rage-fueled that he lands a spot on the most dangerous one, a fight-to-the-finish…
