And the on paper Oscar goes to…The Running Man! I was humming with excitement at the prospect of Edgar Wright directing Glen Powell in a great Stephen King adaptation. There are times this blockbuster reaches its potential, but it can’t sustain after those peaks long enough to last more than as a YouTube compilation in the years to come.
The Running Man is a key part of Freevee, the free television programs on every night. It’s the American Idol of its time…except you get murdered if you lose. Ben Richards (Glen Powell) reluctantly auditions because his daughter Cathy needs medicine and he’s blackballed from work across the city. His eff you survivalist energy excites Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), who sees his potential for ratings. The network agrees, and after being introduced to the world by host Bobby T (Colman Domingo), Ben goes on the run, earning as many $$$$ as he can…while trying to stay alive 30 days, something no one on the show has ever done.
The first hour of The Running Man is bangin! It’s where Edgar Wright gets to flex his directing muscles most. His fake game shows are excellent stupidity: I could see in a year or two a couple of them being real things. When Ben goes on the run is when the real magic happens. There’s a sequence in a dilapidated old apartment complex that’s got everything you want in a big action sequence: shirtless Powell, growing suspense, cat and mouse games, and an incredible oner chase down a hallway with bullets flying everywhere capped off with a stellar grenade explosion. Like Ben at the end of it, I had bug eyes, tongue out, giant middle fingers in the air, hooting and hollering. The Michael Cera section gives us more demented, insane Edgar Wright, turning a house into a jigsaw puzzle of horrors and mayhem leading to the big trailer sequence that’s as fun as it looks. Had the movie staying light on its feet, The Running Man could have been one of the great films of the year.
But Edgar Wright has two big problems he can’t overcome: what’s the message of this film, and how does it end? Underneath all this explosion riddled spectacle is a deep, cynical story of haves and have nots. The Running Man wants to have it both ways: be big fun entertainment that hammers home the plight of the working class. Put together in this movie it just ends up with jarring tonal shifts that make the audience resent the messaging more than elevate it. Not helping is the last 40 minutes of the film. It feels as if after the big Cera sequence, realizing they had a plane and 10 days to shoot, Wright and Michael Bacall forgot to finish the script and came up with this ending. It’s a convoluted mess, that sucks a chunk of life out of the film before, try as they might with twists and turns, to get to the final shot of the movie, never a good idea.
Hey, at least it’s gonna be a helluva YouTube compilation! I’m most curious now about how this Running Man will be compared with the Arnold Schwarzenegger 1980s version. So, aspiring editors, here’s your chance: combine the two together to form the best running man movie out of the two films. Or, wait till you get your chance to direct, and reboot it with Patrick Schwarzenegger to come full circle.