Mini Film Review – The Running Man

I have just seen The Running Man; and it was really good! Directed by Edgar Wright, and starring Glen Powell, Lee Pace, and Josh Brolin, and based on the 1982 novel of the same name by Stephen King; The Running Man is a dystopian action comedy film, about a blue-collar worker, who in an attempt to raise some cash to help his family, and heal his sick daugther, signs up for the most dangerous gameshow on TV…The Running Man! I really like the previous adaptation of The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (personally I think it’s possibly his best film), so I was interested at least to see how this one would pan out. The film starts off pretty slowly. It works hard to setup the life of Ben Richards, and the dystopian world he is in, but it does feel like a blur early on, and you’re desperate for it to pick up the pace, even just by a little. But it’s so worth sticking around for, as it just gets better and better. It reminds me of something my brother once said about The Simpsons. He used to say that over it’s run, the show just got better and better (even though it has degraded in quality consistently for over a decade now). Well, in the case of this film, it does just that, it gets better and better. The action picks up, but so does the personal story, and the drama surrounding it. The film also works hard to make the dystopian society more of a thing in this entry. In the 1987 film, it just sort of mentions it, but doesn’t go much further; whereas here it points out rather well the class divide between the rich and poor, and TV’s desire to censor that to keep the nation oppressed as much as possible. Plus it made several comedic quips at the style of reality TV shows that are (sadly) around in this day and age. Altogether it started off feeling very mediocre, but it ended up being one of the best action films I have seen this year!