The Running Man review: "Some fun action and Glen Powell's star power aren't enough to energize this disappointing Stephen King adaptation"

"This game is no game," warns Colman Domingo's TV host in The Running Man, a new Stephen King adaptation that should be a pulse-pounding thrill ride, but is instead a disappointingly damp squib.

The game in question is the titular Running Man, a high-stakes, televised contest where contestants must outrun a team of expert killers ruthlessly hunting them down, with a huge cash prize at stake. Contestants can go anywhere in any disguise, but they must survive 30 days to win the jackpot: a feat no one has ever achieved.

If this sounds familiar, that's because King's novel (written under his pen name Richard Bachman) has been brought to the big screen once before in the '87 Paul Michael Glaser movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Edgar Wright's (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) take on the tale, though, is not a remake. Rather, The Running Man (2025) is a second adaptation of the same source material, this time starring Glen Powell as Ben Richards, a gritty contender who is hellbent on winning at least a portion of the billion-dollar prize for his struggling family.

The angry man

We soon learn that Richards was fired from every job he's had for subordination. In this grim dystopia, that translates to helping his fellow workers or speaking to a trade union representative. This leaves him cash-strapped with an ailing child at home, and his wife Sheila (an underused Jayme Lawson) forced to work in a sleazy club to keep the family afloat.

As Richards sets off to audition for a game show – any show but The Running Man, he assures Sheila – we get our best look at the totalitarian regime of the film's world. Richards' claustrophobic living conditions are suitably drab and gray, he's brutally beaten for trying to help an elderly man who collapses in the line to audition, and a massive, armored truck passes him in the street. Naturally, he ends up a contestant on the deadly gameshow after a conversation with TV network boss Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), to his wife's chagrin. So begins Richards' epic task.

The problem is, Richards never really moves beyond one character trait: angry. While it's fun to watch him spit insults and threats at those who work at the sinister Network as he auditions (playing a word association game with "anarchy," Richards demands "when?"), it gets grating pretty quickly. It's a waste of Powell's considerable movie star charisma when our hero is rarely doing anything other than smirking his way through a sarcastic line of dialogue, threatening someone, or flipping off a camera.

Similarly, while Richards' whole motivation revolves around saving his wife and child, so little time is spent with them that they're completely thinly sketched: it's hard to care about them at all beyond a basic moral obligation. That in turn makes Richards' whole endeavor ring hollow.

It then becomes hard to understand why the audience, usually baying for the blood of every contestant, begins to cheer for Richards as the film progresses, especially considering the Network has primed them to hate Richards and his family. The Network mercilessly edits his taped dispatches to make Richards appear a crazed maniac, but, as he gets further than any other contestant, the crowd turns and throws their support behind him. It's baffling; Richards is never a folk hero or a particularly likable underdog, even if he is setting a new record for the show. In fact, it's difficult to pinpoint what he stands for at all. There are some speeches about the state of the world, but they all feel pretty empty, and it's unclear what exactly the film is trying to say about any of its themes of media manipulation or exploitation of the impoverished beyond "this is bad."

Missed opportunities

The dystopian aesthetic also falls away pretty quickly: on the first full day of the contest, Richards hides out in a normal hotel, and he later races down regular highways. It's a shame when this universe hints at being fascinating. If the intention was to show how close the real world is to this grim future, it falls flat.

It also doesn't help that there are a number of jarring inconsistencies to make sense of: much is made of Richards mailing his mandatory tapes with post stamps that can't be traced to evade the Network, but then we're also shown that The Running Man has ways of following every contestant through constant surveillance and even DNA tracking. Richards also gets used to the Network's talent for manipulating footage and learns not to trust anything he sees, until the plot requires him to fall for a painfully obvious trick from the bad guys involving such doctored footage.

One way The Running Man does shine, though, is the film's outlandish villains. Domingo is excellent as host Bobby Thompson, playing his role with dazzling flair. He's just the kind of cartoonishly exaggerated presence you need to anchor the sadistic premise. Brolin is also great as Dan Killian, the slimy Network boss with a liar's smile and sharp eye for entertainment, and Lee Pace is very watchable as the superbly sinister Evan McCone, who hunts Richards with a stylishly laconic determination. Unfortunately, though, Pace spends almost the entire runtime masked, which is a regrettable waste of his acting chops.

Any of this could be forgiven – or at least overlooked – if the film were an adrenaline-fueled adventure that moved too fast to linger on questions. But the pacing is frustratingly stop-start. There are two action set-pieces that are fun enough, however. One sees a stark-naked Richards trying to scale the outside of a building as the hunters close in on him, and another involves Home Alone-style wacky hijinks as Michael Cera's underground revolutionary gets a longed-for chance to fight back against the Network. It's a much-needed jolt of energy halfway through the film.

Mainly, though, this particular set-piece highlights how much the film is missing Wright's signature panache. This is the most inventive the film gets, and overall, it's lacking the camera tricks and witty humor that characterize Wright's filmography. So, even though the action can be fun, it doesn't really sing. In fact, if it wasn't for his name in the credits, it would be hard to place this as a Wright movie at all. It's a real shame, because a film like this could really benefit from that stylistic twist.

Ultimately, The Running Man is a run-of-the-mill action flick, which is bitterly disappointing for a film adapted from a Stephen King story, helmed by a skilled filmmaker like Edgar Wright, and starring one of cinema's most promising leading men in Glen Powell. Near the end of the film, Brolin's villain sums up his ethos with one pithy quote: "Simply entertain them." It's a shame the film can't.

The Running Man is in UK cinemas from November 12 and US theaters from November 14. For more, check out our guide to all the most exciting upcoming movies of the year, or all the upcoming Stephen King movies and TV shows.