Thirty-eight years later, The Running Man is back on our screens, playing to a world that seems to have caught up with the original’s idiocy. This new one has a significantly less bulky but no less watchable star in Glen Powell, who plays runner-up Ben Richards. Fired from various jobs for insubordination, and tending to a sick toddler, he was tapped to join America’s favorite do-or-die game show after a producer identified him as “quantifiably the angriest man to ever audition.”
The show’s premise has also been tweaked a bit. Instead of navigating a series of video game-like levels for the length of a TV broadcast, Richards must now survive in the real world for 30 days, watched over by hovering TV camera droids, pursued by armed-to-the-teeth “hunters”, private police goons, and a general public who spot and film runners with their own smartphone app. The longer he goes on, and the more pursuers he can kill, the more money he makes. He is cheered (and booed) by a massive audience of brain dead oafs called Running Fans, glued to their screens 24/7. Like Schwarzenegger’s Richard before him, Powell makes the transition from on-screen villain to beloved folk hero, pandering to the cameras as his antics drive the ratings.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because this new version of The Running Manwhich was co-written and directed by Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World), draws as much from the original film and Stephen King’s source novel as from contemporary reality. A present-day America overseen by a game show president, where ICE gangs with Dr. Phil McGraw teaming up to turn deportation raids into reality television seems ripe for a Running Man remake But that’s the problem. Satire relies on caricature. And the new version is hardly an exaggeration. Does the idea of a deadly game seem so far-fetched, in a world where the success of Netflix’s South Korean thriller series Squid Game (itself a variation on the The Running Man format) has an actual, licensed Squid Game-style competitive reality TV show? Or when a grinning ten-year-old YouTuber named “MrBeast” baits contestants with ten thousand baits to sit in a tub full of snakes? A few weeks ago, I watched live as rookie New York Giants quarterback Cam Skattebo’s ankle turned 45 degrees, as if it were being turned by some invisible wrench, while a bar full of rival fans cheered.