“In the year 2025, the best men don’t run for president, they run for their lives.”
Edgar Wright takes that line from Stephen King’s The Running Man and runs with it – at full sprint, grinning, bleeding, and jabbing us in the ribs the whole way. His version isn’t a remake so much as a reclamation, gleefully stripping away the 1987 film’s gold-spandex camp to reveal something grimier, angrier, and unnervingly familiar.
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.
The world he builds is grotesquely believable. Skyscrapers glint above slums; reality TV distracts the masses while megacorps own the news, the government, and probably the oxygen. The line between entertainment and exploitation has never been thinner. Even the editing mirrors the chaos – relentless yet somehow humane, breathless but never heartless. Wright toys with perception so thoroughly that both our protagonist, Ben Richards, and the audience soon question what’s real, what’s staged, and who to believe. It’s a paranoid fever dream that somehow coheres into something cathartic.
At its centre is Glen Powell, shedding his golden-boy sheen for something raw and riveting. As Richards — a working-class father forced into the state-sanctioned death game to buy medicine for his daughter — he’s all coiled rage and bruised tenderness, a man trapped in systems he can’t outpace. Powell plays him like a live wire, equal parts desperation and defiance, confirming what many suspected: he’s far more than a pretty face; he’s a shapeshifter.
Colman Domingo steals every scene as the game’s host, a smarmy, snake-charming cocktail of Caesar Flickerman and a Fox News anchor. Michael Cera gets a deliriously unhinged Home Alone-style sequence that injects manic comedy into the dread, and Lee Pace appears as a towering foil to Powell’s reluctant hero – to say more would spoil the fun, but suffice it to say he’s excellent.
The pacing never falters. Even the moments of calm hum with danger, every pause another chance for the system to close in. Wright weaponises paranoia, turning it into rhythm; the film’s meta-structure, where the rules of the game mirror the rules of storytelling, gives the whole thing a sly, self-aware snap. It’s as if the movie knows it’s being watched, and doesn’t quite trust us either.
If there’s a flaw, it’s that Wright sometimes can’t resist showing off, tipsy as he is on his own riotous energy. But honestly, that’s half the fun. The tonal lurches aren’t missteps, they’re pirouettes at full speed. After all, better a film that burns out in a sprint than one that politely paces itself to the finish line.
The Running Man is furious, funny, and frightening and, like the best works of film, it makes you laugh just long enough to realise you’re the punchline.
The Running Man releases in cinemas from November 12th. Watch the trailer here.
