Director – Edgar Wright – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 133m
***1/2
In an America controlled by a TV network producing violent game shows, a poor man signs on for its biggest show The Running Man whose contestants never come back – Stephen King adaptation is out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, November 12th
His baby daughter is sick, and medical treatment is expensive. His wife is working as many shifts as she can at a hostess club (we never see it – it’s described in dialogue) in an attempt to bring in some money. But it’s not enough. Ben Richards (Glen Powell) needs to find more money to pay the bills and keep his family alive. While he is good at what he does, he has a tendency to speak up when things aren’t as they should be, and this gets him into trouble. As in, he has been blacklisted by previous employers of whom he’s fallen foul. So, he turns to the Free-Vee TV network that controls and runs everything, providing a subsidised TV to every home and non-stop, reality TV and game show programming.
The network’s chief reality TV series is The Americanos, featuring the day to day lives of its well-off women in black and loosely modelled on Keeping Up with the Kardashians (TV series, 2007-2021). Clips appear on screens throughout the narrative, but like the TV soap opera Invitation to Love in Twin Peaks (TV series, creators: David Lynch, Mark Frost, 1990-91) you only see clips that give a visual flavour, leaving the audience intrigued as to what the plot might be.
The game shows are skewed toward the violent and the lethal. Spin the Wheel, for example, puts a contestant on a human-sized version of a hamster exercise wheel where they must answer trivia questions. If they get an answer wrong, the wheel spins faster. The most lethal show on the network is The Running Man in which three contestants must survive for 30 days in the real world, pursued by masked and costumed hunters whose job it is to kill them, led by McCone (Lee Pace). No contestant has survived more than 29 days, and many don’t last longer than 48 hours. Ben vows to his wife that he’ll never appear on that show.
Nevertheless, he signs up to appear on FreeVee and discovers the way they select their shows’ contestants. Applicants undergo a rigorous selection programme of physical challenges and scenarios, at the end of which, the network selects them for the most appropriate show. So it is that Ben finds himself face to face with FreeVee boss Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) being asked to sign a contract on the one show in which he vowed not to take part. It’s The Running Man or nothing. So he signs up…
His fellow competitors are Laughlin (Katy O’Brian from Love Lies Bleeding, Rose Glass, 2024) and Tim (Martin Herlihy). She is no-nonsense dyke who parties hard and lives life like an action heroine in a movie (which, in both the game show and the wider narrative, she is); might she survive the 30 days? He definitely won’t; he is the type destined not to last more than 48 hours on the show.
And contestants are required to send video updates (on VHS cassettes!) every 24 hours; they must not miss the deadline, but drop the cassette into a postbox before the allotted time.
Wright and co-screenwriter Michael Bacall have a lot of fun creating this world. The TV show features a charismatic turn by Colman Domingo as TV show host Bobby T who appears onstage as presenter in the networks huge theatre before a live audience who he proceeds to milk for all they’re worth.
The cross-country nature of the show – filmed by ever present spherical drone cameras whenever they catch up with contestants – causes Ben to run across various characters – the small, savvy, poor street child who helps him find refuge with his tenement family as Ben attempts to lay low at the start, idealist leftist radical Elton (Michael Cera) who plans to use Ben’s potential survival to trigger an uprising to take down Free-Vee and build a new, fairer society and, finally, the well-off car driver Amelia (Emilia Jones)who finds herself in the wrong place in the wrong time and who really doesn’t want to get involved.
In an all-too brief appearance, William H. Macy (Fargo, Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996) turns up early on as a workshop owner who supplies Ben with fake ID and was about to offer him a partnership in his business had he not signed up for the show. And punctuating the proceedings are podcasts by The Apostle (Daniel Ezra) undermining the FreeVee regime.
It’s a lot more complex than the previous adaptation of Stephen King’s novel starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (Paul Michael Glaser, 1987), which is hilariously acknowledged here with banknotes imprinted with the star’s face. Which is not to say one movie is better than the other: the old one was basically an action movie, whereas the new one, whilst not ditching its action movie credentials, goes deeper into exploring the dystopian world in which is it set. And Glen Powell makes a terrific leading man. The film is never boring and serves up serviceable and, indeed, thrilling popcorn entertainment throughout.
The Running Man is out in cinemas in the UK on Wednesday, November 12th.
Trailer: