'The Running Man' Review: Action Star Glen Powell Headlines Too Tame Remake

If we look around us lately, 20th century science fiction has become a 21st century reality. Real life in the year 2025 – the date in which Stephen King sets his 1982 novel “The Running Man” – involves technological surveillance, corporate feudalism, infotainment propaganda and extreme inequality, everything his story about a spooky game show predicted. King, like the great science fiction authors Philip K. Dick and George Orwell before him, was writing a warning. But in the decades since, people have taken his bleak ideas as a blueprint, like when Elon Musk boasted in

The timing couldn't be better (and worse) for Edgar Wright to remake “The Running Man,” just to not put fire to it. He and his co-writer Michael Bacall have adapted a fairly faithful version of the book, unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1987 show. (The only way to suffer this is if you imagine it's a pun-based parody of testosterone movies.) It's telling that they left out the year 2025 and only slightly innovated production design with spherical drones. But there is little urgency or indignation. Instead of a mirror of what could be, it is simply a blurry reflection of what is.

Glen Powell plays Ben Richards, a cash-strapped father blacklisted by his employer who reluctantly agrees to be a contestant on a hit television show that no one has survived. There is only one network, FreeVee, and its goals overlap enough with the government's that it's not worth analyzing the distinction between them. Every day Ben dodges a death squad, he'll earn money for his wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson), and their sick baby—up to a billion “new” dollars if he can last a month. (The updated bills have the Governor's face printed on them.)

But as always, the game is rigged. Network boss Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) and smarmy host Bobby T (Colman Domingo) rally viewers to hand over Ben for a cash prize, lying that he's a freeloader who refuses to get a job, the typical scapegoat who trots out taxes to turn the middle class against the poor and the poor against themselves. An enraged FreeVee-addicted grandmother (Sandra Dickinson) genuinely believes Ben eats puppies. “She used to be a kind and intelligent woman,” her son says with resignation.

Clearly, Wright wants to make a political satire that echoes the silliness of our own real news. Politics is present in the armored vehicles that circulate through the city streets and in the masked militias who seek to catch Ben for the reward money. However, we don't feel the paranoia of eyes on the streets, although it turns out there's no way to disguise Powell's fox-like features under a ridiculous stick-on mustache. A con man named Molie (William H. Macy) warns that the televisions themselves are watching people. It really doesn't seem like they are. I have felt more uncomfortable in a house with Alexa.

As far as satire goes, this slightly cruder version of right now doesn't have much effect. Little of what we see is surprising, thought-provoking, or even all that futuristic. Advertisements for a drink called Liquid Death (real) and a Kardashian-style reality show called “The Americanos” (essentially real) are projected on the screens. The film's only representative of upper-middle-class normality, a hostage named Amelia (Emilia Jones), could trade places with any Pilates instructor.

When an underground rebel, Bradley (Daniel Ezra), analyzes how the network chases ratings by turning people into archetypes, he doesn't tell today's audience anything they don't already know. King wrote the character as an environmental activist; Here he is more of a television critic. Likewise, Bradley's sidekick Elton (Michael Cera) has gone from pathetic idealist to monster-swallowing agent of chaos, as if Kevin McCallister from “Home Alone” grew up to join Antifa. Elton's motivations don't make sense, but at least Cera bursts into the film with such energy that his sequence is hilarious. Laughing that he likes his “bacon extra crispy” while taking aim at a police squad, he also breaks the seal on the use of bad puns in this new version. Starting with her scenes, the script includes as many moans as it can.

Wright has a talent for casting standout actors. Domingo's fatuous celebrity host is fantastic, even doing the retro jogger dance with Kid 'n Play aplomb. We see enough of Ben's fellow competitors, played by Katy O'Brian and Martin Herlihy, to wish we had more time with them. One of the hunters, Karl Glusman, has such intensity that I will be watching what he does next. Too bad the main villain played by the charismatic Lee Pace has to spend most of the movie covered in a shroud.

Meanwhile, Powell is going through her own test of survival in Hollywood. Everyone seems to agree that he is the next movie star, but he still hasn't gotten the right vehicle to create stars. Here, as always, he's treated like a Swiss Army knife on a construction site: skilled at many things, from humor to action to drama to romance, but his character lacks the oomph to really show off his skills. We're told time and time again that Ben is the angriest man in the world, but Powell's innate likability, that arrogant, charming, heroic glint in his eye, makes him seem grumpy at his worst. His best moments are all comedy, like when Ben uses a thick accent to hide as an Irish priest, or his snappy exchange with a psychologist who subjects him to a word association test. (Anarchy? “Gain.” Justice? “Funny.”)

Still, I missed the truly misanthropic protagonist of King's novel, a bitter bigot radicalized to see himself not just as a cog in a machine but as the spoke of a revolution. That idea is talked about here, but the film doesn't take itself seriously enough to give us chills. It's not fair to judge “The Running Man” by how closely it sticks to the book, and if you remember King's ending, then you know there's no way Wright could have pulled it off, although his solution is pretty clever. But tone-wise, there's just not enough rage, gore, or fun.

Maybe Wright feels the same way, too. He's wanted to make this movie since 2017 and had the lousy luck of making it for Paramount in the year the studio embraced the government and sacrificed its employees for its own billion-dollar bounty. There is no grimmer satire than scrolling through the closing credits of “The Running Man,” flashing past images of a raised fist saying “Together Against the Grid” and seeing the final words on the screen: A Skydance Corporation. Or maybe it will, if someone makes a documentary about what Edgar Wright may have had to edit.