The Hunger Games meets 1984 meets Blade Runner meets Black Mirror… I think you get the point: The Running Man is pretty standard Sci-Fi. In a not-so-distant future, Ben Richards lives in abject poverty, and when his two-year-old daughter gets ill, he can’t afford medical treatment so he applies to compete for the reward in The Running Man—a TV competition in which three runners must survive thirty days while being hunted by the world.
Although not as terror-inducing as other Stephen King stories, the fear The Running Man instils is through the fact that it doesn’t feel that far-fetched. The scenes where Dan Killian alters Ben’s tapes to demonise him are happening today; the struggle to distinguish between real from A.I. is becoming a harsh new reality. This also applies to the overload of advertisements and overwhelming level of surveillance seen throughout the movie. The Running Man touching upon these issues makes it an action movie that isn’t just violence for the sake of violence.
However, these positives are overshadowed at times by badly written dialogue. One scene in particular was impressively bad, especially since it showed blatant hypocrisy on the part of the filmmakers. In their movie about condemning commercialism, they abruptly cut the tension in a crucial scene between Ben Richards and Elton Parrakis by having Elton drinking from a can of Monster and asking Ben, “Monster?” This obvious, unsubtle product placement earned an eyeroll from all four audience members.
Intriguingly, I’ve heard some people say the movie is a caricature of the American right and others say it’s a caricature of how the American left sees the American right. I take option three and say that this movie is hardly unique enough to say anything special about world politics. I suggest you watch it as it is: a fairly entertaining action movie with some vague political messages embedded within.
“Glen Powell by Gage Skidmore” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.