The Running Man review: ‘makes good use of Glasgow'
Edgar Wright’s new adaptation of Stephen King’s 1982 sci-fi thriller is a sneaky, satirical celebration of the author’s prophetic ability to imagine the worst, writes Alistair Harkness
The Running Man (15) ★★★★
Set in a world in which gameshows grip the nation while tech companies manipulate our reality and allow fascism and populism to dominate politics, Edgar Wright’s new adaptation of Stephen King’s 1982 sci-fi thriller The Running Man isn’t so much a propulsive slice of speculative science fiction as a not-all-that-off-the-mark reflection of the garish horror show that is our current moment.
Sticking much closer to King’s source novel than the previous Arnold Schwarzenegger version (King actually set the novel in 2025), the film stars Glen Powell as Ben Richards, an angry, insubordinate, unemployed resident of the run-down Co-Op City whose unwillingness to turn a blind eye to corporate malfeasance has seen him blackballed by the all-powerful Network, the multimedia conglomerate that runs America and keeps its population narcotised with an array of deadly gameshows that promise its audience riches without ever delivering the life-changing sums advertised.
With a sickly baby at home, the desperate Richards tries out for the neo-Roman “Games” and finds himself selected for the titular show, a televised manhunt with a billion-dollar prize if he can survive for 30 days against a group of bloodthirsty hunters (led by Lee Pace) and a viewing public incentivised to aid his capture.
Directing his first all-out blockbuster, Wright puts the film-geek sensibility he honed on the likes of Shaun of the Dead and Baby Driver to good use here, skewering the barbaric TV world that serves as a backdrop to the film. Filling it with blackly funny moments of savagery normalised as entertainment, he has a keen understanding of how easily audiences can be played with skillful editing and appeals to their baser instincts.
He also makes good use of Glasgow as a location for much of the fictional Co-Op City, augmenting the city centre with towering, digitally-rendered industrial structures to give the film a gnarly, lived-in feel, and using further afield neighbourhoods in a way that recalls the Harvey Keitel-starring Death Watch, Bertrand Tavernier’s 1979 reality TV-anticipating cult film, which also used Glasgow as a dystopian vision of the future.
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As the game gets underway, though, so too does the action, and pleasingly Wright doesn’t go all Marvel with endlessly escalating set-pieces. As with the book, he restricts the film’s point of view to his protagonist’s, keeping things more intimate, with Powell’s movie-star charisma working well as the character’s survival instincts start winning him fans in spite of the show’s efforts to tarnish him at every turn.
That also ensures it’s never as bleak as the recent film version of King’s thematically similar The Long Walk, although that in turn presents Wright with a slight problem of how to end the movie without resorting to the book’s 9/11-esque finale. It’s a problem he doesn’t quite resolve, partly because we’re living in an age in which insurrectionary fervour and calling out fake news no longer has the exclusively underdog appeal it once did in dystopian fiction. But if the ending feels a little garbled, the rest of the film is a blast, a sneaky, satirical celebration of Stephen King’s prophetic ability to imagine the worst.
The Running Man is in cinemas from 12 November
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