Not unlike Mike Flannagan‘s Doctor Sleep, Wright’s The Running Man both adapts a King novel while also riffing on a fairly unfaithful ’80s Hollywood iteration—and sometimes with uneven results. With his mask and beret, McCone plays more like a supervillain than the upscale antagonist in King’s book, and he does lead a quintet of beefy hunters. But gone are Fireball, Captain Freedom, and the other costumed killers that Schwarzenegger battled.
Although the shredded body he shows off during a fun escape sequence makes Powell’s hero just as unbelievable as Arnold’s as a man living in poverty, this Richards better fits King’s depiction of a man mad at the world. That rage only intensifies when his wife Shelia’s (Jayme Lawson) waitressing job veers toward sex work and still does not generate enough to buy proper meds for their daughter.
But as stated and re-stated in an incredibly clunky script by Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright, Powell’s Richards looks out for his fellow man, repeatedly stopping to help beleaguered folks along the way. The shift away from the loner that King imagined helps make Wright’s adaptation work, for two reasons. First, it better fits Powell’s skill set as an actor. Even though he’ll state his anger in insults, sneers, and flipped birds, Powell cannot stop the twinkle in his eye. He has a natural charm that no amount of post-explosion grit can diminish, or how many times he fantasizes about knocking out Killian’s too-white teeth.
That charisma pairs with the second reason that the softer Richards works, because it makes him feel unreal in a cinematic way. When King released The Running Man in 1982, under the pen name Richard Bachman, America had just three television networks. But it also had a reservoir of working-class anger that only intensified as the economic crises that plagued the Carter era made way for Ronald Reagan’s administration and its self-satisfied embrace of free-market capitalism. For King, there was a clear analogue between the spectacle of game shows and the rhetoric of deregulation and trickle-down economics that Reagan sold to the nation with his Hollywood smile. The result is a bleak work, one angry at television’s ability to obscure the truth but still convinced that the truth is out there.
Edgar Wright’s take comes at a time when we’re surrounded by screens in our pockets, cars, and homes, each with access to endless channels. Deepfakes and editing allow the average person to create their own reality, easily dismissing inconvenient facts as “fake news,” resulting in a post-truth age. Furthermore, Wright’s work has never been concerned with the truth. From his breakout series Spaced through Last Night in Soho, Wright’s maximalist style blurs fiction and reality. The characters of Shaun, Scott Pilgrim, and Baby don’t just express their feelings via the media they love, they seem to live within it.
The Running Man takes place in a world saturated by media, which serves as a tool for fascism. So while Wright indulges in his usually bravado filmmaking to create the primetime Running Man TV show, powered by Domingo’s electric performance as the host, he tamps down his style when focusing on our hero. This isn’t to say that he makes Richards’ scenes boring, certainly not when augmented by the costumes by Julian Day and production design by Marcus Rowland, both of which recall the dystopias of 1980s blockbusters. But outside of a delightful sequence in which Daniels and Michael Cera’s Elton unleash a series of Home Alone-style traps on invading cops, Wright shoots the action in competent but anonymous cinematic language.
