A man joins a game show where contestants, allowed to go anywhere in the world, are pursued by “hunters” hired to kill them.

There are some movies that don’t deserve to be as good as they are, with great talent elevating material. The Running Man is quite the contrary. It’s inexplicable that it’s this bad given how much it has going for it.

Co-written and directed by Edgar Wright, the auteur behind some of my favorite films (Shaun of the Dead, Last Night in Soho, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, even Baby Driver was pretty great) The film is based more on Stephen King’s original novel than on the 1987 Schwarzenegger movie, but all three tell the same basic story of a man who goes on a game show where he is hunted, in order to win money to help his family. Glen Powell is the titular character aka Ben Richards. Richards is a nice guy but prone to rage bursts which is why TV network boss Killian (Josh Brolin) casts him – he thinks he’ll make for great TV.

If only.

Nothing against Powell, he actually has the decent looks and affable charm to be the everyman action hero of this generation (his recent turn on SNL showed he’s capable of making fun of himself, something spiritual forefather Tom Cruise lacks) but The Running Man is just so inconsistent. The only time we see Richards wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson), she tells him not to join the game show, but we know what movie we signed up for so repeating that argument makes it a completely hollow waste of time. Richards is able to find help as he jumps through action sequences, first with William H. Macy’s Molie, an underground weapons and counterfeit ID guy that every action movie has, then with Daniel Ezra’s Bradley, a futuristic political content creator, and eventually Michael Cera’s Elton, a conspiracy theorist who wants to bring political zines back.

The movie is a mess, but it’s a non-stop, action-filled mess and I found it hard to care about any of it. Needlessly long, inexplicable in many cases (the movie spends a lot of time trying to control the outcome for television when it also shows it can instantly AI-generate any image they want to with their cast of characters, even some rando Ben jumps in a car with. What’s the point then?

There’s a decent movie to be had about the manufacturing of video to fake a story, or game shows where the stakes are life and death, where real people are drawn into complex webs of money-grubbing execs looking to sell out the American public. Unfortunately, it’s not this one.

Jonathan’s grade – D