The Running Man Fits In With The Other Dystopias

I’m reviewing The Running Man from an odd perspective, and it only feels fair to warn you of that if you’re going to read this review. Simply put, I’ve not read the book—I’m not even that familiar with Stephen King’s work, all told. Further, I’ve not even seen the previous adaptation. My experience with the death game genre comes from my deep love of The Hunger Games franchise.

I mention this because a lot of the stuff I recognize from Hunger Games can likely trace its roots to The Running Man, and I have to imagine the two of them are now in a cultural feedback loop, informing the other with each movie. Thankfully, I love me a good dystopian satire—the more blatant the better—and I don’t mind having two takes on it. And they are subtly different takes.

The Tone of The Running Man Is Not As Expected

While the trailer led me to expect a bombastic, sexed-up, hyper-violent movie, The Running Man’s tone is more tense than anything else. Much like Panem, the dystopia they live in is a fascist police state with a heavy focus on economic suppression for the lower class. The first few minutes of the movie are a repeated and brutal hammering of how bad poverty is and how deep one can get stuck in it, especially if the powerful don’t like you.

The difference is the blood-and-circuses of it all. The Running Man universe is one of base entertainment, with the one other show we get to see being a fatphobic torture sport, and the titles we hear for shows we don’t see are concerning. The cycle of people being in poverty and entertained by the suffering of others, only to find the best possible way out of poverty is to demean or sacrifice oneself to create that same entertainment is a fascinating and horrific scenario, and it’s kind of a shame we don’t know more about how it works (I have a feeling the book does exactly this).

The Worldbuilding Implications Remain Interesting

But that’s obviously not the number one topic of the movie, and once we do get to the titular game, things don’t play out as expected. Once again, I assumed bombast, but The Running Man is actually a rather quiet film for long stretches of time. There are a lot of spy-like moments, where our main character employs fake I.D.s and general escape trickery, only resorting to actual violence if he really, really needs to use it. In hindsight, this is much more realistic—the character doesn’t even have the usual trope of a military background to justify their comfort with violence—and it works well with the themes of hope and treating human lives as precious being the secret to overcoming a system like this.

This approach—somehow—doesn’t kill the pacing either, as the movie still goes at a great clip. We move from situation to situation, and the feeling of the hunters closing in (and the game timer running down) keeps everything exciting. Even the sudden shift into absurdity that occasionally happens, like murderous children or a house full of silly button-activated traps, doesn’t break the momentum. This is a world where people are conditioned to basically treat hyper-violence as a fun thing, and even the civilians we meet aren’t immune to that mindset.

It Is Easy To Have An Hour Go By While Watching

No, what breaks the momentum is hard to pin down, but it does happen eventually, and we can even see the difference in storytelling approach that causes it. Early on, while the movie still flows, we get scenes touching on systemic racism and environmental destruction. I can’t speak on how well it’s actually presented, but the scenes—from a structural perspective—felt like an organic part of the story. At the three-fourths mark or so, scenes like this become very rushed, almost like it had a list of stuff to cover and was in a panic to hit all the points it missed.

And to be clear, I don’t blame the filmmakers for spending the extra time upfront establishing how likeable our characters are and how dire this situation is (you got to make it believable that someone would agree to a show like The Running Man), but this movie needed an extra thirty minutes if it wanted to achieve its thematic goal. I love love love the social commentary on deepfakes being used to spin propaganda and how the rich in this universe are so isolated from the consequences of their lifestyle that they don’t believe the violence is even happening. I even adore the tricks our main character eventually figures out to fight back. But that and more simply don’t have time to breathe like before. The tension is gone. The scene progression is scattered. And the ending becomes this convoluted mess of moments that left me cold.

Unlike some people, though, a bad ending doesn’t ruin a movie for me. Especially one where I can see the tonal vision. The Running Man still feels like a movie making great points about society and leaves plenty of room for an audience to discuss and ruminate on what it has to say—and it’s fun to watch.