Verdict: 3/5
‘The Running Man’, the newest film adaptation of Stephen King’s Bachman Books, hit theatres last week, and in honesty, I was prepared to hate it.
Being a big fan of the Bachman Books, (Stephen King’s collection of novels written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) I was interested to see how closely they stuck to the original concept.
Without spoiling the plot or ending, ‘The Running Man’ is a perfectly average action film, which you could see without knowing the story or having watched the 1987 version with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Simply, the main character Ben Richards (Glen Powell) is cast on an intensely popular reality show in which he must evade skilled hunters and the public in order to win a large sum of money. Richards undertakes this dangerous and often fatal challenge in order to provide medicine for his sick daughter, and allow his family to leave their life of poverty.
While I’m surprised to say I did enjoy this film, there were a couple of salient issues for me.
The casting of Glen Powell was the first nail in the coffin. Somehow, casting a chiseled, six-foot-tall man with perfect teeth didn’t scream ‘dystopia’ to me. I think while his performance was good, he was not the best choice for this role, and his casting was an obvious ploy to lure in those who like Powell for little more than his physique and smile.
The second downfall was the film’s lack of political awareness. The film is set in the year 2025, in a dystopian environment where everything is controlled by network television. While hinting at its link to today’s political climate, I couldn’t decide whether the film was self aware enough to not hold a mirror to our own society, for fear of backlash, or wasn’t self aware enough to realise the parallels and so didn’t act on them. I think a movie like this could be so powerful in today’s world, but the care just wasn’t taken to get it there.
Pleasantly however, the film was engaging and had me interested until the very end. The secondary characters lifted Powell’s performance and gave it the usual chaotic humour director Edgar Wright is known for.
On the surface, this is a perfectly fine action movie, with plenty of shoot-out scenes, explosions and daring escapes. Often it felt like it was building to something that never came, but all in all was, in my opinion, just fine.
See this movie at Event Cinemas Parramatta.
Madeline Dantier is the author of the Experience Parramatta series, hosted by Parra News.