RATING
Director(s): Edgar Wright
Country: United States
Author: Stephen King, Edgar Wright, Michael Bacall
Actor(s): Glen Powell, Alyssa Benn, Sienna Benn
Written by Tom Augustine
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been eight years since Kendall Jenner’s abortive Pepsi ad ‘Live for Now’, which attempted to leverage a heated moment in identity politics fuelled by the murder of George Floyd to sell soda. One of the most infamous and disastrous commercial campaigns in modern history, it was rightfully savaged by critics and the public alike, a hopelessly cynical attempt to cash-in on the zeitgeist which transformed Jenner into the perennial Kardashian laughing stock, as though the rest of that billionaire family haven’t also been selling you something off the back of ‘girlbossing’ every minute of their public lives. It remains a fascinating cultural document — amid the conversations surrounding the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, the act of nonviolent protest for progressive causes was en vogue, the advertisement’s lack of specifics a reflection of an era of glossy surfaces that ultimately diverted us away from substantive change. Most importantly, it is a literalisation of the idea that anything can be sold, that any progressive movement can be repackaged into an economic product. It’s never been confirmed he said it, but we print the legend anyway — thus, Lenin’s maybe-quote ‘the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them’ has an undeniable ring of truth.
Years later, it isn’t protest that’s chic, it’s revolution. Advertisers, studios and media companies alike don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and so our current landscape is a bizarre meld of neoconservative backtracking on the age of woke alongside attempts to cater to the popularity of notions of overthrowing the rich and powerful, in a way that placates as much as it inspires. One of the first, and still the best Black Mirror episodes, ‘Fifteen Million Merits’, summarised the idea nicely, in the way it subsumes Daniel Kaluuya’s wannabe freedom fighter into the machine he lambasts with every breath. ‘Eat the Rich’ cinema — films made by rich people, attempting to cauterise the social wound of resentment and fury by playing to the fantasy of revolutionary revenge through films and series like Saltburn, Triangle of Sadness, The White Lotus, Blink Twice, Death of A Unicorn, The Menu, the Knives Out films, and so on and so forth, are a way to signal that, should the revolution actually come, they were the ones on your side all along. The placation of empty, individualised vengeance neglects to offer a view from the other side, intentionally — the possibility of a collective liberation is never really in sight, is it?
Somehow the fourth Stephen King adaptation to hit the big-screen this year, Edgar Wright’s science-fiction chase thriller attempts to update the material for the year in which the original story was set. Unfortunately, The Running Man is another of Wright’s diminishing returns, draining the fun of its early stretches through limp attempts at social commentary and toothless satire.
Edgar Wright is no revolutionary, that much is clear. His occasionally diverting but ultimately misguided update of The Running Man is testament to a director who has been on the downswing for some time, never really recapturing the go-for-broke nerdy ecstasy of the Cornetto Trilogy, an irreverent but immaculately executed series of comedies that lampooned, respectively, the zombie horror, cop movie and alien invasion subgenres with the affection and unpretentiousness of young, hyper-literate fans of the craft. As Wright has climbed ever further into the Hollywood firmament, it has been hard to say exactly what has been lacking — is it the steady dilution of his trademark, hyperactive style? The continued insistence on investigating capital-T Themes in his work? Or the loss of a certain Brit-punk idiosyncrasy? Whatever it is, the original cult success of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World feels very far removed from the Wright of 2025. Here, Wright has the biggest budget of his career, but is essentially functioning as a director for hire, retelling the story written by Stephen King under his pseudonym Richard Bachman, a film that famously was already told in cinema form in the eighties by Paul Michael Glaser with a hilariously out-of-place Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead. Incidentally, it’s the second Bachman novel to be adapted this year, the first being the recent, quite good The Long Walk, which also shares a dystopian genre with The Running Man, though their targets differ somewhat. The Running Man is the more openly satirical work, though Bachman’s story, as with the best satires, continued to thrum with darkness and percussive rage, depicting a future society (incidentally set in 2025) whose class divide has worsened so intensely that one of the only ways to break out of poverty is through a reality TV show that incentivises and misleads one’s fellow citizens to aid trained assassins in hunting regular schmoes down and killing them in the street.
The shape of Wright’s Running Man is largely of a piece with Bachman’s, to begin with: ascendant star Glen Powell stars as Ben Richards, a working class hero in dire straits after his advocacy for his coworkers gets him blacklisted from finding employment, and so enters the contest in order to make enough money to heal his sick child — if he can survive just a week, the accrued money he’ll make will get his wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) and daughter out of poverty for good. If he survives thirty days, he’ll be a billionaire. Naturally, no one has ever seen out the entire thirty days, and the competition is entirely rigged by oily producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) and silver-tongued host Bobby T (Colman Domingo). Along the way, Ben relies on the help of similarly poverty-stricken community members, while demonstrating a resourcefulness of his own that begins to threaten the stranglehold of Killian and the all-powerful, all-seeing ‘Network’ that he commands. King, as Bachman, has long demonstrated an uncanny ability to key into our greatest anxieties and fears, and prophesy the darker avenues our society has been barrelling down for decades — but his vision of 2025 is remarkable in its eerie predictive capabilities. The most powerful man in the world, after all, is a reality TV star, whose influence is vast and capacity for violence and unchecked corruption are not in question. King’s clear-eyed vision of a populace easily misled into turning on their own, and hungry for entertainment to stem the pain of existence, even at the expense of others, feels not far removed from our reality whatsoever. It is in the channeling of these ideas that Wright’s Running Man operates best, in its fleet and entertaining early sections, as Ben flails from hiding place to hiding place, narrowly escaping a team of mercenary assassins and their relentless drone cameras hoping to livestream the executions to a baying public. Powell, whose clean-cut image is not necessarily one you’d expect for such a role, is nevertheless quite good as Wright’s muse, a broad, iron-jawed action hero for our times who maintains a certain watchability even as Wright loses the thread of his storytelling. What’s more alarming is the director’s drifting presence in the craft of the film — very rarely do the director’s oft-imitated visual flourishes make themselves known, nor his knack for clever, staccato rhythms in the editing. He feels diluted— a gun for hire.
Worse still is the film’s limp cultural commentary, which strains to align the original material with the specifics of the Trump era but pulls almost every one of its punches. As with his last underwhelming effort, Last Night in Soho, the director is well out of his depth in discussing issues of such seriousness — the sly, winking observations of Hot Fuzz and The World’s End hit far harder with far less effort than anything Wright has tried on in these recent years. Wright aims solely for easy, obvious targets — faceless corporate executives, rabid MAGA hordes, the insidious evil of AI, and yes, the Kardashians. All worthy targets, but needing a sharper and more fearless approach than anything Wright has to offer. In Last Night in Soho, Wright attempted to take a withering look at misogyny and sexual assault, creating something unintentionally retrograde in the process. With The Running Man, his critique is even shallower, aiming at hollow platitudes that align it with those aforementioned ‘Eat the Rich’ films far more than something with real, trenchant points to be made.
The inadequacy of Wright, and The Running Man, to meet this cultural moment is an ironic reflection of the material within, and the contrasts between Bachman’s original telling and Wright’s new, alternative ending. The film’s downright abysmal final act tips gleefully into silliness, with the director veering away from Bachman’s downbeat, artfully realised finale for a denouement with a striking lack of balls. Wright hopes to telegraph a triumphant revolution— with Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ in tow— an approach that completely backfires within the machinery of The Running Man’s production. The film’s cringeworthy product placement, for brands like Monster Energy and Liquid Death canned water, is one thing— but the film’s insistence on not offending, on not really going there, is its ultimate undoing. It’s worth remembering that The Running Man has been made by Paramount Pictures, a company that has its own blacklist, has expelled actors for calling out genocide in the past, and is owned by David Ellison, a billionaire Trump supporter who has, among other things, installed ‘anti-woke’ activist Bari Weiss at the head of CBS News. Any package selling revolution, coming from this distributor, should be met with suspicion — after all, the call is coming from inside the house.
The Running Man is in cinemas now.