(3.5 stars)Turns out the revolution will be televised after all.
It’s crazy that “Predator” and “The Running Man,” the two 1987 action flicks starring athletes-turned-actors-turned-governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura, now have a sequel (“Predator: Badlands”) and a remake, respectively, opening a week apart.
Actually, director Edgar Wright’s new “The Running Man” isn’t so much an update of 1987’s second-best Schwarzenegger vehicle as it is a more faithful translation of the eponymous 1982 Stephen King novella (published under his pseudonym Richard Bachman) from which both adaptations were spun. King’s book, set in the nightmare future of 2025, imagined a United States afflicted by gross wealth inequality, ecological ruin, lawless lawmen, deepfake videos, a shady new currency and a populace distracted from all of it by a diet of sadistic reality programming supplied via ubiquitous “Free-Vee.”
Turns out the revolution will be televised after all.
It’s crazy that “Predator” and “The Running Man,” the two 1987 action flicks starring athletes-turned-actors-turned-governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura, now have a sequel (“Predator: Badlands”) and a remake, respectively, opening a week apart.
Actually, director Edgar Wright’s new “The Running Man” isn’t so much an update of 1987’s second-best Schwarzenegger vehicle as it is a more faithful translation of the eponymous 1982 Stephen King novella (published under his pseudonym Richard Bachman) from which both adaptations were spun. King’s book, set in the nightmare future of 2025, imagined a United States afflicted by gross wealth inequality, ecological ruin, lawless lawmen, deepfake videos, a shady new currency and a populace distracted from all of it by a diet of sadistic reality programming supplied via ubiquitous “Free-Vee.”
Satire, right? The influence of a single quasi-governmental broadcast network, in place of the truth-atomizing prism of the internet, was the only part of King’s prophecy that rings false.
That ’87 adaptation had its charms but was a compromised product: Director Andrew Davis was replaced early in the shoot by TV journeyman Paul Michael Glaser, who Schwarzenegger later wrote “shot the movie like a TV show, losing the deeper themes.” (Davis would go on to make “The Fugitive,” another film about an innocent man on the lam.) But the lack of depth was a script problem, not a directorial one. Prolific ’80s action scribe Steven E. de Souza kept King’s rough premise of a televised manhunt as the bread-and-circuses of a fraying 21st-century America and chucked everything else.
The book’s protagonist — a laborer blacklisted for blowing the whistle about workplace radiation, whose wife turns to sex work to buy medicine for their gravely ill infant daughter — became a family-free cop whose bosses frame him for murder after he refuses orders to fire on an unarmed crowd during a food riot. The multistate, month-long survival contest King envisioned was compressed into a single night’s telecast. Most crucially, the author’s grim denouement was replaced with an ersatz happy ending.
In our 2025, with a reality-star president taking a wrecking ball to the White House and talking about hosting UFC events on the South Lawn, King’s Reagan-era jeremiad seems too matter-of-fact to register as irony. So it’s nearly miraculous that Wright (who shares screenplay credit with Michael Bacall) has threaded the needle of giving his all-new, less-different “Running Man” teeth without making it too despairing to endure.
In fact, it’s a bloody hoot. The Brit who brought us such violent delights as “Shaun of the Dead” and “Baby Driver” has just the right mixture of empathy and impishness to turn King’s cautionary tale into a would-be blockbuster with integrity. If it isn’t as timely, thrilling or funny as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Gil Scott-Heron-quoting “One Battle After Another,” it’s cut from the same highly flammable cloth.
Wright has an appealing and spry leading man in Glen Powell, who channels the boiling rage of his accidental-insurgent character, Ben Richards, far more persuasively than Ah-nold did. Wright expands the roles of a pair of Richards’s allies: Daniel Ezra plays a sort of YouTuber-for-good, while Wright has called up his “Scott Pilgrim” star Michael Cera as a revolutionary and zine publisher who’s a little too eager to help Richards elude his pursuers. A “Home Alone”-style set piece wherein Cera ambushes a squad of masked, body-armored goons is where King’s fatalistic sensibility gives way to Wright’s more jocular one. That tension keeps the film crackling along unpredictably.
Wright did his earliest work of note in TV, with the delirious British geek sitcom “Spaced,” but there was nothing prosaic about the way he shot it. That show was the laboratory where he began to refine the anarchic style that serves him so well here. All his hallmarks are present: the kinetic but legible editing, the well-chosen 20th-century needle drops, the expertly cast supporting roles.
In that last category, we have D.C. native and Duke Ellington School of the Arts alum Jayme Lawson, late of “Sinners,” in a small but memorable part as Richards’s spouse, Sheila Richards. Katy O’Brian, the breakout co-lead of last year’s “Love Lies Bleeding,” plays one of Richards’s fellow runners, a cocksure queer woman determined to live it up before Lee Pace’s squad of network-employed “hunters” burn her down. Josh Brolin is ever-sturdy as amoral network exec Dan Killian. And no one is having more fun than Colman Domingo as host Bobby Thompson, a heel in a bedazzled tux. Beneath his glib exterior, he knows that one of the condemned souls he puts on Free-Vee every night will become a folk hero, if not something more.
As Cera’s character tells Richards: “This country’s ready to blow. And you’re the initiator.”
Sounds like the title of something Schwarzenegger might’ve starred in circa 1987.
R. At area theaters. Contains gruesome violence, brief nudity, and many words you can say on cable TV but not, as yet, on Free-Vee. 133 minutes.
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