Review Roundup: Edgar Wright’s The Running Man
The original Running Man movie, released in 1987, starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as a disgraced officer who is framed for a crime he didn’t commit and forced to participate in the nation’s favorite gameshow, where criminals are hunted down on live television. It’s not one of Schwarzenegger’s best ’80s flicks, but still pretty enjoyable.
Jump ahead nearly forty years, and now we’re getting a remake from director Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead), who promised a more faithful adaptation of Stephen King’s original 1982 novel (which just so happened to be set in 2025). Glen Powell stars Ben Richards, who decides to enter The Running Man in order to earn a billion dollars and save his family, but he must survive for 30 days while evading the show’s assassins.
So, does Wright’s take on The Running Man — which also stars Josh Brolin, William H. Macy, Lee Pace, and Michael Cera — stack up to the source material? Or is it another remake that nobody really needed? Read on for a selection of critical reactions to Wright’s movie.
In the early 2000s, a remake of a sci-fi horror/novel like this would have starred Tom Cruise or Colin Farrell (Minority Report, the second Total Recall), and we would have all had to deal with that level of hyper-earnestness. Thankfully, Powell’s charm is part of what carries things through, but there’s something else The Running Man has going for it: a simple, yet horrifying premise, executed with precision, and just enough outrageous twists to keep you guessing.
The Running Man ultimately becomes akin to the very thing it criticizes: a hollow, mollifying image of empowerment that distracts from the logical conclusions of its nihilistic premise.
The meaning of those final moments make the difference between The Running Man being a fun but dumb exercise in blockbuster filmmaking or a true nightmare of totalitarian media control. The interpretation all comes down to the challenge that Richards makes when he looks at what might be nothing and might be you the viewer and declares his anger. Are you angry? If so, then The Running Man might make you angrier; it could also simply entertain you; or it might just take away your hope altogether.
The weird thing about seeing The Running Man today is that in the ’80s (and the ’90s, too), all those dystopian visions were rooted in a feeling of future shock. They were wake-up calls from the fascist beyond. America feels closer to those realities now, yet because of that, and because we’ve seen so many garishly downbeat sci-fi movies, dystopia is now the air that our imaginations breathe. There’s precious little shock value left to the decadent society the new Running Man unveils.
There are moments where Wright’s gift for blending the real-world physicality of slapstick with the fantasy enhancements of CG make it seem like he could turn into a legitimately strong action director. Anyone who saw Hot Fuzz might have already had that inkling. But so far — much like Adam McKay, who worked on the Ant-Man Wright left when he realized it wouldn’t really feel like his movie — he continues to prove more adept at tightly weaving his thematic concerns into genre-friendly comedy. Making a muscular, fun-enough adaptation of The Running Man is at once beneath him and beyond him.
Even when it stumbles, it’s still clever, funny, and twisty enough to hold your attention. That’s the bad news, but to return to my original point: There was no way this would ever be a bad movie. In Edgar Wright’s hands, The Running Man works more often than it doesn’t, and despite tripping up a time or two, when it’s at its best, it’s one of the most exciting blockbuster experiences of the year.
Since this is an Edgar Wright film, it should be no surprise that The Running Man is wildly propulsive. It takes a few beats to lock in, but once it gets going, it never stops, and it’s quite a ride. As Ben goes from city to city and location to location, the whole dynamic of the film changes again and again. Each big action set piece has its own feel and a unique, innovative take. Wright never does the same thing twice, and within the confines of this go-anywhere, do-anything game show, he finds many ways to have fun and push boundaries.
Despite the world-building and character development problems, there is too much talent on display here for the film to crash completely. But it is long, with chase after chase, long after the film dispenses with any pretense that this will be resolved through strategic thinking. As the body count accumulated, I lost what little interest I had in how the film would be resolved.
It’s pure Wright from the opening beat: camera moves that fizz with energy, razor-cut edits timed to the pounding soundtrack (and to the rhythm of our hero’s panic), and humour that teeters between laugh and scream. The result is both dystopian and absurd — Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face is literally printed on the currency — but Wright balances his trademark wit with genuine fury. This is a film about media manipulation, systemic cruelty, and the commodification of suffering, and it lands its punches hard.
For roughly the first two-thirds of its running time (so to speak), Wright’s version of The Running Man plays the story straight — at least, more surface-level and sincere than his best movies, which typically bring the audience in on the joke early and often. And then the film goes entirely off the rails, to the point where it stops feeling like an Edgar Wright movie altogether, and starts looking like a story mandated by studio execs with no sense of humor at all.
The new version hews far more closely to the source material than its predecessor. But the jokey qualities and irreverent personality that have energized Wright’s best films sit somewhat awkwardly against the grim picture of class and wealth inequality, poverty, inadequate healthcare and oppressive law enforcement. It’s somehow both fast-moving and lumbering, exciting and numbing. I was with it for a good while, but it wore me down.
The relentless pace generates enough of an endorphin rush to power the movie beyond plausibility nitpicking. It also prevents the audience from probing its worldview too closely, up to a point. That’s probably for the best. Although this adaptation of King’s book is dirtier and nastier than the 1987 film version, it’s not much more insightful about the nihilistic emptiness and cruelty of modern life. The more distance you get from it, the more it falls apart.
For each punch The Running Man packs in its solid action set pieces, it feels like the film pulls another one. It’s a film led by a director and actor who clearly understand their assignment. Yet Wright and Powell approach the task of updating the story with such dutiful care that they dilute their own core value propositions. Each artist understands their own commodity, and they knowingly dilute it down to fit inside the comfortable box of a genre.
The Running Man opens in theaters on November 14, 2025. Watch the trailer below.
