The Running Man Still Has The Perfect Balance Of Camp And Action
Can this really be improved?
This November, Glen Powell will step into the shoes of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role of Ben Richards, the titular man-on-the-move in a reboot of The Running Man. But can the new Edgar Wright-directed movie truly top this 1987 cult classic? The answer is, of course, no. All Wright’s new Running Man can do is be completely different, something that is perhaps great on its own merit, and almost certainly, a little more faithful to the 1982 book — written by Stephen King, and published under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman.
But the new Running Man can’t top or beat the 1987 Running Man because the original film is the most unique cocktail of truly earnest social commentary and batsh*t campy magic. It has recently hit Netflix and is worth your time for the simple reason that it's aged extremely well, and despite having a positive reputation among genre fans, it still feels underrated. Mild spoilers ahead.
The reason The Running Man is so great isn’t that, in spite of its kitschy, bizarre tone, there’s a deeper, more thoughtful movie. Instead, The Running Man is perfect because it is self-aware enough to make its hyperbolic, campy aspects part of its overall vibe. If you were to take the in-universe TV commercials out of The Running Man and insert them into the original RoboCop (which came out the same year!), you wouldn’t notice any real tonal difference. While RoboCop took great pains to point out the dangers of having a corporation run the police force, The Running Man assumed it was a given that corporate media and mass governance would be combined in the future. The point is, if you saw RoboCop in July of 1987 and then saw The Running Man in November of 1987, you could easily see the former as the natural prequel of the latter.
This is a circuitous way of saying that The Running Man should have the same iconic status as RoboCop, at least when it comes to the strange category of ultra-violent movies which are also aggressively anti-violent. The movie depicts a near-future world in which criminals are forced to compete in a televised gladiatorial contest that pits them against “Trackers,” who are massive celebrities. The Running Man is, in this future, the most popular show on TV, and we’re made to understand early on that it essentially controls the laws. And yes, if this basic premise seems familiar, The Running Man ran so, decades later, The Hunger Games could carefully tread in its footsteps.
Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger) prepares to enter the game.
Directed by Paul Michael Glaser, the screenplay from Steven E. de Souza is perhaps the true star. This is an incredible piece of writing in which we witness a horrific police state, but also features Schwarzenegger dropping James Bond-esque clunky dad jokes left and right, including, bizarrely enough, him saying “I’ll be back,” three years after the original Terminator and four years before T2: Judgement Day.
Before the actual titular Running Man game, the movie has basically three set-ups; first, we meet Ben Richards, a military man who refused to fire on unarmed people during a food riot. Next, Richards escapes from a high-security prison with two idealistic rebels, Laughlin (Yaphet Kotto) and Weiss (Marvin J. McIntyre). These two men are the only people who pass for friends of Richards, who, in the first roughly 25 minutes, seems amoral and cynical. But then, in the third set-up, the one that really gets the movie going, Richards tries to find his brother, only to find a woman named Amber Mendez (María Conchita Alonso) living in the old apartment. Richards briefly takes Amber as a hostage and tries to leave the country using her credentials, only to be captured by the authorities again.
The Running Men: Yaphet Kotto, Marvin J. McIntyre, and Arnold Schwarzenegger; the sidekicks are a bigger deal than you might remember.
This then leads us into the real movie: The host of The Running Man, Damon Killian (Richard Dawson) offers Richards a spot on The Running Man, and if he refuses, Killian will put Weiss and Laughlin in the games on their own. Richards knows these two guys won’t last a second, so he agrees to go in their place. This act of sacrifice ends-up being pointless, since Killian puts Laughlin and Weiss in the games anyway, and eventually, puts Amber in their too, after she realizes that Richards has been set up and all the film footage of his crimes has been altered and turned into propaganda.
While it seems like The Running Man takes awhile to get up, and, um, running, the truth is, the various set-ups of the film do a decent job in making Richards seem both more formidable, and oddly enough, more caring. Another version of this movie would have put him in the game much quicker, say, right after he was framed for murdering civilians. But instead, by having a few stops along the way, The Running Man feels less like a gimmick and more like a real movie. For those who don’t remember a sci-fi landscape before Black Mirror, The Running Man feels like one of those extra-long Black Mirrors that really takes its time, but also, oddly, doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Ben (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Amber’s (Maria Conchita Alonso) relationship is a key pivot point in The Running Man.
In addition to Arnold’s clunky jokes, sprinkled throughout The Running Man is another kind of sardonic humor; we’re told there’s a popular TV show called The Hate Boat (instead of the Love Boat), which again, feels close to a Black Mirror premise like “Joan is Awful.” But, there’s also a hilarious glimpse at another TV series called “Climbing for Dollars” in which a man is just dangling in a pit, grasping at money, while attack dogs try to eat him.
As mentioned before, this image would fit right at home in the TV world of RoboCop (“I’ll buy that for a dollar!”) but also has a funny and dark George Saunders quality, too. This image, of a man grasping at money while dogs try to devour him, is a perfect microcosm for the artistic genius of The Running Man; we’re laughing at this sick and deranged TV show, but also wondering if we would be strong enough not to watch it in real life.
