Movie Details
| Title: | The Running Man | |
| Director: | Edgar Wright | |
| Year: | 2025 | |
| Genre: | Dark Future | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.20.25 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (7)
- Baby Driver
- Hot Fuzz
- Last Night in Soho
- Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
- Shaun of the Dead
- The Sparks Brothers
- The World's End
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.20.25 | Internet | The second movie in my Richard Bachman double feature. This stars Glen Powell as a guy who signs up for a deadly game show to provide for his family. This adaptation is more faithful to the book in major ways than the 80s Arnie version but I have to say on record I like the 80s movie a lot. I was a kid in the 80s so every Schwarzenegger blockbuster that came out I was there for. I was surprised when I read the book in high school how different in tone and scope it was but Richard Dawson's casting was undeniable and the supporting cast had some real characters like Yaphet Kotto and Jim Brown and Jesse "The Body" Ventura. Plus Maria Conchita Alonso was having a little moment between this and Colors and Predator 2. But I didn't watch that movie, I watched this movie. On paper it's a home run. Love Edgar Wright as a film nerd even though I didn't love his last couple movies, love the source material (or at least I did when I was in high school). Match made in heaven. My expectations for this were pretty low however because the trailer was an absolute piece of shit. It made it look like this was Edgar's sell-out movie like Kevin Smith's Cop Out. Just corny humor that doesn't hit and sub-par cast replacements (sorry Coleman Domingo. I like you in Four Seasons and haven't seen your breakout stuff but nobody can top Richard Dawson). I'd heard it was good-ish but that trailer really deflated me. Well I'm happy to say I liked this pretty well. I think it's a good movie. It feels like a complete vision and follows the plot of the book while having the requisite number of action sequences and there's some wit in the script that I guess Paramount's marketing department didn't get or care to showcase in the trailer. I was particularly interested in how they would end it because they can't do the book ending and ultimately I was satisfied. So I'm equal parts happy and relieved. Just because it's on the forefront of my mind, my memory of the book's ending is that he hijacks or somehow procures a plane, gets his belly cut open while killing the hunters or the pilot, has to hold his intestines in while he scrambles for the flight controls, and flies the plane into the network HQ building. This was in the early 80s when such an idea was novel and interesting. I loved it back then. It was bleak as shit but so was the rest of the book. These Bachman books were very dark and pessimistic and nasty. King's early namesake work also had some serious teeth but I remember thinking these were edgy and farther out than the more straight forward horror stuff he was known for. Just the idea of a dystopia where people died for real on these tv shows and cruelty was on full display and people were so into it they gladly participated by reporting him for cash. In the early 80s that was a science-fiction idea, probably inspired by roman gladiators and nazi sympathizers but still. Anyway, I'd forgotten a lot of the middle of the book but in reading the wiki summary it seems like the movie sticks pretty close! It also does a good job of balancing the future King imagined circa early 80s with video tape cassettes and cable networks and the 2025 we know today with drones and dna scanners and shit like that. The edges of the frames are jam packed with references and nods and extra work that I'm sure was a pain to make the world feel real but also make it seem like the Running Man show didn't exist in a vacuum. The movie also leans into a different dystopia than The Long Walk which I appreciate. This one's much closer to a cyberpunk situation with corpo-funded governments and class disparity instead of totalitarian regimes and police states. Clearly this movie has a bigger budget, but I think it uses that money well. Yeah, I liked it. whew. |
