The Running Man Review: Glen Powell’s Victory Lap

It’s no coincidence that two of this year’s angriest and most nakedly political movies are adapted from the Bachman books – stories published by Stephen King under a nom de plume because they were seen as off-brand for the author. Both deal with our prurient interest in game shows as a form of endurance torture for the contestants – first Francis Lawrence’s mercilessly bleak vision of The Long Walk, and now a new version of The Running Man.

The big difference between the two is how they present game shows. The Long Walk has arguably aged better, since its depiction of a bunch of overly optimistic strangers thinking they’ll beat the odds feels akin to the survival horror packaged in Naked and Afraid. The Running Man has more glitz and glamour, hosted by the show biz Bobby T (Colman Domingo) with dancing girls and a baying audience, and feels much more ’80s with its “come on down!” energy.

Luckily, The Running Man has a righteous anger that transcends time, and the right everyman hero. In this dystopian future, the corporations are now the government and the execs lord it over the starving, dying masses of Co-Op City. The one real path to social mobility is The Running Man, a smash hit show in which players must outrun a team of hunters led by masked killer McCone (Lee Pace). Survive 30 days on the run and you win a billion new dollars. Get caught, get a bullet in the head.  

As eager as the show’s audience is to see bloodshed, the movie’s audience is inevitably going to root for Ben Richards (Austin’s own Glen Powell), a loving husband and dedicated dad who only signs up for this crazy scheme to pay for medicine for his sick kid. Oh, and he’s a committed union man who rescued his co-workers from certain death on multiple occasions. He’s the rough-hewn working-class hero we need right now as he sticks it to the hunters and the network, headed up by Josh Brolin as a set of sentient veneers in human form.

It’s undoubtedly British director Edgar Wright’s most Hollywood movie to date (not least that two soft drink brands get very offensively obvious product placements). Wright brings the aggressive energy that he showed in his breakout Cornetto Trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End). Those films spoofed the American blockbuster, and now he gets to make one of his own, with one of the most effortlessly charismatic actors of the era. Fortunately, Powell doesn’t just coast on his charm, proving his action man chops while giving real pathos to the part of a desperate family man who becomes an unlikely symbol of rebellion. His political relevance is explained to him by Michael Cera, having the time of his life as a zine-printing activist with a delightfully boobytrapped house that takes out network goons with Wright’s signature verve.

Unfortunately, The Running Man starts to waddle awkwardly after this, lurching into a lumpen third act. It still sticks far closer to the original book than the 1985 Arnold Schwarzenegger version, with the last-minute addition of an exec hostage, Amelia (CODA’s Emilia Jones), yet what worked on the page doesn’t work here. Instead, it becomes one of a series of diversions and under-delivered moments like the final reveal of McCone, or dead ends like a Keeping Up With the Kardashians spoof that’s constantly on the air. The ending simply lacks the guts to remain committed to King’s sociopolitical fury, and what starts as Wright’s best post-Cornetto Trilogy film ends up as his weakest. But when it’s really up to speed, The Running Man laps the competition.

This article appears in November 14 • 2025.