‘The Running Man’ Review: Glen Powell Runs Headfirst Into a Televised Nightmare

Stephen King’s novel The Running Man, published in 1982 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, turned out to be eerily prophetic. While the dystopian, techno-totalitarian future it imagined was hardly new territory for literary science fiction—1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World being the most obvious reference points—there are details in King’s book that stand out today for how precisely they line up with our present, 43 years after its publication: media control over society, the rise and dominance of reality TV, corporations running everything, ordinary people turned into informants, and “solidarity” reframed as a problem rather than a virtue, among other elements that make the novel feel strikingly contemporary. There’s also one detail that now lands with a chill: The Running Man takes place in… 2025.

First adapted for the screen in 1987 in a film directed by Paul Michael Glaser and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger—a movie that never ranked among the biggest hits of his first decade as an action star—The Running Man now returns to theaters in the very year in which its story is set. And while some elements have been updated to better match the real present—others, meanwhile, remain very different—the clarity with which its premise mirrors the world we live in today borders on the unsettling. The problem is, well, almost everything else.

The Running Man starts from a genuinely disturbing idea, but its execution never really strays from the kind of entertainment those same all-powerful corporations in this “future/present” would plausibly produce. For all its critical intentions, the film’s adrenaline-fueled pace and its dramatically hollow, repetitive structure end up flattening everything in their path. Its protagonist, Ben Richards (played by Glen Powell), may emerge as a symbol of rebellion, but the world he is meant to be fighting against ultimately wins the aesthetic and narrative battle. In the tension between what the film says it is critiquing and what it actually shows and does through images and sound, the latter clearly prevails, overshadowing nearly everything else.

In this version, Richards is a worker repeatedly fired from different jobs for his rebellious streak and his inconvenient habit of trying to help coworkers in trouble. Married to Sheila (Jayme Lawson), who works as a bartender in late-night joints, and the father of a young daughter, Cathy, with serious health issues, Richards lives in the impoverished Co-Op City and doesn’t even have enough money to buy the medication his child needs. Desperation eventually drives him to sign up for the most popular reality show of the moment: The Running Man. The premise is simple and brutal—survive for 30 days without being killed, whether by security forces or by ordinary citizens who, tempted by large cash rewards, are encouraged to turn contestants in. Although Richards initially resists—his plan was to compete in less dangerous games—he soon realizes he has no real choice.

Where Edgar Wright’s film is most interesting is in the construction of this world, one that both resembles and diverges from our own. The British director of Shaun of the Dead, working here on what is arguably the most commercial and least personal film of his career, builds Ben’s surroundings with technical precision: an intense, frenetic, hyper-mediated society, dominated by massive screens broadcasting live shows produced by corporations that also control the government. The visual style recalls some of Schwarzenegger’s ’80s films, particularly Total Recall, while the storyline—aside from the ending—remains relatively faithful to King’s original novel.

Once the game itself begins, Richards is pushed through a series of tense, high-risk situations. He encounters people who help him, others who turn him in, and some who betray him outright, all while advancing through stages designed to help him evade the Hunters, an elite, paramilitary-style unit tasked with tracking him down. At a certain point, it becomes clear that Richards’s growing popularity—and the ratings generated by his constant flight—are too tempting for the show’s producers to ignore, forcing our hero to reassess his position. Colman Domingo plays Bobby T., the smug, omnipotent host of the show; Josh Brolin is cast as its cruel, megalomaniacal producer; and William H. Macy, Michael Cera, and Emilia Jones appear as figures Richards crosses paths with at crucial moments in his escape.

To be fair, the film’s narrative problems are not entirely of its own making. The Running Man relies on a classic science fiction trope: those savage competitions where the prize is survival and losing means death. The issue is that, after endless franchises built on similar mechanics—from The Hunger Games to Squid Game—and after countless reality shows that operate on comparable elimination-based logic (one of them, ahem, being The Apprentice, hosted by a certain Donald Trump), the device feels not only exhausted but also compromised. Despite its stated intention to undermine the system from within, the film ends up reproducing the very logic it claims to criticize. Beyond the effectiveness of a few set pieces or the tight tension of certain confrontations, the prevailing sensation is one of déjà vu. For a more compelling take on how to film a politically charged pursuit built on similar ideas, One Battle After Another traces a comparable path while relying on far fewer action-movie clichés.

By now, it is hardly news—even to audiences who consume them—that shows of this kind are heavily manipulated to manufacture love and hate for their participants, and that their supposedly spontaneous dramatic situations are far more planned and orchestrated than they appear. That is why some of the film’s “revelations” on this front feel hollow at best and unnecessary at worst. The same goes for its predictably mapped-out narrative arc. Despite a few sharp visual touches, a strong score, and a certain technical precision in the action scenes, The Running Man feels far more impersonal than Wright’s earlier work. He remains a talented and intelligent filmmaker who, for reasons that are hard to fully explain, has not managed to make a film on par with his abilities since the so-called Cornetto Trilogy. Neither Baby Driver nor Last Night in Soho—and certainly not this one—comes close to matching the wit, humor, and vision of those early films.

The impersonal nature of the story, Powell’s weak performance—he is perilously close to becoming a caricature of himself—and the film’s Marvel-like aesthetic even make one nostalgic for the clumsy charm of the 1987 Schwarzenegger version. If The Running Man deserves attention for anything, it is for how accurately a then-thirtysomething Stephen King imagined a future that looks disturbingly like our present: a world that celebrates individual survival at all costs and punishes any attempt to question that narrative. Anyone looking for a clearer picture of how life works in such a world will find the daily news—from Minneapolis to Greenland, from Venezuela to Iran—far more powerful, and considerably more unbelievable, than this mechanical piece of fiction.