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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE RUNNING MAN TRIPS ACROSS THE STARTING LINE  
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Eileen Jones
November 21, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Edgar Wright’s dystopian satire, The Running Man, tries to play
it safe and ends up pleasing no one. _

Still from The Running Man. , (Paramount Pictures)

 

Everything is wrong with Edgar Wright’s _The Running Man_, and I say
that as someone who’s long been rooting for him. I’m a big fan of
his early films _Shaun of the Dead_ (2004) and _Hot Fuzz_ (2007). I
liked his 2021 rock-documentary _The Sparks Brothers_, and I even
appreciated parts of _Baby Driver_ (2017) and _Last Night in Soho_
(2021).

But his latest is such a misfire that’s downright weird.

_The Running Man_ isn’t _quite_ a remake of the cheesy old 1987
Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle mainly because Wright wanted to do a
more faithful take on the original source material: Stephen King’s
very prescient 1982 novel. It’s about a dystopian future America run
by a corporate media network, and it was written by King to depict the
distant year of 2025. In other words, it should’ve been a cinch to
make an action movie that appeals to the immiserated American masses
in our very real dystopian 2025, instead of the expensive box-office
dud
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this is.

Maybe that’s because Wright doesn’t seem invested at all in
connecting the dots. He keeps depicting in broad strokes the dire
authoritarian turn America has taken and hinting at a resistance
movement operating underground among the vast immiserated underclass,
but it’s all kept bland and politically vague. Vague enough for King
to declare [[link removed]]
proudly that he loves this adaptation because it’s “a bipartisan
thrill ride.”

Where’s _Robocop_ director Paul Verhoeven when you need him? His
version of _The Running Man_ might’ve set audiences’ hair on fire
in the best possible way.

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Still from The Running Man. (Paramount Pictures)

Wright’s movie centers on one titanic network that rules the nation
while the vast majority of desperately poor people alleviate their
sufferings by watching the network’s most popular game show, _The
Running Man_. The show is structured to feature three of their own —
their fellow poors — as contestants in a “Most Dangerous Game”
scenario, trying to survive for thirty days on the run out in the
hostile world where every citizen is on the watch, looking to turn
them in for cash rewards. “Hunters” hired by “the execs” who
run the nation track the contestants down with high-tech surveillance
gadgets and the latest in lethal weaponry.

The winner gets an insane one billion dollars in prize money. But the
thing is, there are never any winners — the game is rigged, and
nobody ever survives for thirty days.

Glen Powell plays the protagonist Ben Richards, a hard-up unemployed
construction worker who’s been blackballed from employment because
he once made a suspiciously decent gesture on behalf of his fellow
workers that almost smacked of a unionizing mindset. Meanwhile, his
wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) is working extra shifts as a waitress at a
sleazy club catering to elite men, and his young daughter is seriously
ill with a high fever. They’re giving the toddler useless
over-the-counter drugs, but she needs real — and expensive —
medical attention. So, desperate for fast money, Ben goes to network
headquarters to audition for one of their game shows, having promised
his wife he’ll take anything except the always-deadly _Running Man_.

But his pissed-off demeanor and his employment record of
insubordination is so consistent, he’s immediately flagged as the
perfect _Running Man _contestant. He’s sure to bring loads of
entertainment to the brainwashed masses who can’t help longing for a
defiant representative, though most of them will be equally
entertained to see him brutally killed.

Okay, that all hits pretty close to home, so what’s the problem?

Even by the often absurdly unrealistic standards of Hollywood
filmmaking, the early scenes are so phony it’s painful. It’s as if
no one involved in the production had ever been unemployed or
struggling to get by or living in a crappy low-rent apartment. Though
from what I’ve read about high levels of unemployment in the
American film industry, with crew workers searching in vain for their
next jobs, exhausting their savings, and losing their houses, I know
that can’t possibly be the case.

Powell has never been worse than in this film, trying to play a very
straightforward and accessible part, the protagonist of most action
films, the angry working-class man. Powell’s practically giving a
Brechtian performance, every line delivered as if in quotation marks,
announcing its own artifice. He never looked more like a pampered
Hollywood actor, with a slick smirk and a gym-ripped body, who’s not
really angry about anything. Why should he be? He’s clearly got his.

It’s not enough to have the costume designer “distress” a hoodie
and work boots so they’ll look old and worn. In this movie about the
plight of a regular, working American, he simply can’t pass for a
regular, working American.

And that makes sense in a way. Not only is Wright a Brit but not a
single minute of this film was even shot on American soil — the
whole production phase took place in the British Isles and Bulgaria.
As an Englishman who’s long since made it big in Hollywood, Wright
said
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lightheartedly in a recent interview, “The idea of coming to
Hollywood is now in big inverted commas because nothing shoots in Los
Angeles anymore.”

The other actors in the film’s early scenes that are supposedly
representing immiserated citizens seem fake too — their generic
lines, written by Wright with Michael Bacall (_21 Jump Street_, _Scott
Pilgrim vs. the World_), are delivered as if Martians wrote them. The
sets look fake. The clothes look fake. It’s such a spectacular fake
all around, you keep going back to Brecht. Is Wright trying to pull
off some amazing alienating mindblower here, forcing us to measure our
actual dire sociopolitical straits against this deliberately
theatricalized imitation of dire straits?

Of course that’s not it. I only wish it could be anything that
interesting.

But the overall effect becomes even more startling when the characters
who seem most “natural” are the ones giving deliberately hammy
performances in the context of the _Running Man_ TV show. Colman
Domingo as show host “Bobby T” Thompson, cynically prancing around
the TV studio stage in a sequined purple jacket, and Josh Brolin as
monstrous TV producer Dan Killian, with a mane of salon-styled hair
and a perpetual teeth-whitened grin plastered on his venal face, are
quite believable. They confirm the ostentatiously constructed reality
around them.

William H. Macy as Molie Jernigan tries hard to approximate the
standard character of the weird guy who’s managed to maintain some
sort of decency in a vile society by running a crappy underground shop
that allows him to help the occasional friend on the lam, like Ben.
But it’s a big actor–y performance, as big as Macy’s eyes behind
those giant glasses signifying Molie’s menschy eccentricity.

[[link removed]]William
H. Macy in The Running Man. (Paramount Pictures)

Only Michael Cera achieves something like the recognizable look of a
working-class American guy driven to the edge, and he doesn’t show
up till over halfway through the movie. He plays Elton Parrakis, an
underground contact in a vaguely defined radical resistance movement
who offers Ben a temporary safe house.

Elton lives in his big, rural, ramshackle family home with his
demented old mother (Sandra Dickinson) who “used to be kind and
clever” at some unspecified time before America went into the
shitter. She’s way overdrawn as a person whose insanity has taken
the form of near-demonic pro-fascist screeching, but Elton is much
more believable. He’s pale and pudgy-faced, with scraggly facial
hair and baggy old clothes worn in layers, realistically unkempt and
unhealthy looking because he stays indoors self-publishing political
tracts and wiring his house as one giant trap for the “hunters”
and cops he expects — and hopes — will come blasting through the
door any day now.

But soon Ben is on his way again, meeting more fake people. Like
Amelia (Emilia Jones of _CODA_), a privileged young woman he takes
hostage because he needs her car to make another fast getaway. She’s
supposed to be the “nice liberal” who blindly clings to the idea
that those in authority are just enforcing law and order. She believes
the network propaganda about those on the run as dangerous underclass
malefactors. Of course, she’s quickly converted by Ben’s manly
virtues. It’s not Jones’s fault that she can’t bring it off with
any credibility. It’s a feature, not a glitch, of this too-slick
film that nothing reminds you too much of reality.

It’s all very strange, because the action film as we know it first
arose in the 1970s with films like _Dirty Harry_ and _The French
Connection_, at least in large part driven by the loss of blue-collar
jobs in America that made the nation’s economically dispossessed
long to see violent retribution enacted onscreen. In these films, the
climactic action scene was so often shot in an abandoned factory or
warehouse (a rock quarry in _Dirty Harry_, a factory in _The French
Connection_), it became one of the clichés of the genre. And of
course, evil corporate bosses and corrupt politicians made popular
villains.

Surely nothing could be easier than to revive some of this gritty,
class-conscious sense of suffering and rage. But it’s clear that
Wright doesn’t want to. His reaction to the coincidence of releasing
his film in 2025, the year when King’s futuristic book is set —
though he notes its “kismet” quality — wasn’t to insist on the
way so many aspects of the story represent our current lived reality.
Instead, Wright was eager to preserve
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the neato sci-fi thrill of the “retro-futuristic” and displace his
film in time:

We never say what the year is in the film because when sci-fi films
have to pick a year, they never go quite far enough. . . . We wanted
to make it feel retro-futuristic in the same way that Terry
Gilliam’s _Brazil_ is a ’80s film, but it has some 1940s styling.
One of the ideas going into the production with [production designer]
Marcus Rowland was, “What if this was Stephen King’s 1982 idea of
2025?”

It seems like an elaborate avoidance strategy that dodges what
might’ve been the best argument for doing another adaptation of the
book_. _It _might’ve _been a movie promoted as the fulfillment of
King’s predictions that we’d move toward fascism, and a conflation
of corporate media and corrupt government would shove it down the
throats of an increasingly impoverished people.

Instead, we get King tweeting that it’s “a bipartisan thrill
ride!”

And yet nobody’s thrilled.

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Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck
podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

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* the running man
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* dystopias
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* corporate power
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* corporate media
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* class warfare
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