Movies may have lost their respect for star power, but in an alternate, even-more-dystopian version of 2025, TV producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) is very much a believer. His newest recruit for The Running Man, a reality competition series where contestants attempt to stay alive for 30 days as they’re hunted by professionals and amateurs alike, is Ben Richards (Glen Powell), a man with a history of insubordination, unbroken by his participation in the game. When Richards is offered a spot on The Running Man, he’s neither polite nor grateful in his initial refusal; he’s looking to win quick cash off of a smaller-scale endurance show to get medicine for his sick baby, and has no trouble letting Dan know what he thinks of his billion-dollar temptation. (That’s the prize for surviving The Running Man, never claimed—though there are opportunities to win smaller purses for those who will survive you before you’re inevitably dispatched.) Later, Richards essentially threatens to kill him before the game has even begun. Killian barely seems ruffled. He mostly seems delighted. He can only see star quality, not a threat.
There is, of course, a winking quality to the scenes where Brolin explains to Powell, the latest designated final hope for traditional white-dude masculinity, that he’s got an extra-special charisma. It’s layered with irony over the fact that in our 2025, it’s The Running Man as IP that still gets spiritual top billing over any particular human star—or filmmaker. Stephen King’s 1982 novel, initially published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, was previously made into a 1987 movie that took it more as inspiration than cherished source. It now apparently takes a distinctive voice like director Edgar Wright to stick closer to the book (while also demonstrating marquee-friendly atonement for Last Night In Soho, the movie that dinged his reputation as a virtuoso original).
Among its many changes, the 1987 version took the very ’80s tack of converting the scrawny, scrappy Richards into the brawny, unstoppable Arnold Schwarzenegger, flexing the rest of the movie around his presence. Casting Powell cuts Richards back down closer to normal human size, though an extended seminude scene makes it clear that he’s avoided suffering any malnutrition during his lifetime of backbreaking labor. His real problem is a simmering, barely contained fury at the unfairness of this totalitarian, economically stratified regime, one that threatens to boil over at any moment, kicking off fights where he may be outnumbered or outgunned. It makes him an unreliable cog in fascist machinery, but a stubbornly decent reality-hell runner. Can he actually beat the extremely long odds fueled only by his love for his family and a justifiable anger at the system?
Powell plays this coiled rage well, especially physically—he masters the kind of whipcrack gestures and movements that Wright loves to chop into cinematic punctuation, plus he’s already demonstrated a love of wacky disguises in Hit Man. But the characterization of Richards flatters Powell as much as any given Arnold vehicle builds up its star. You’ve heard of the rote screenwriting-manual advice that a character must “save the cat” early on to establish likability? Despite his temper, Richards is thrown an entire litter’s worth of (metaphorical) cats to save in the first 20 minutes or so, just so that we understand that a guy already willing to risk his life to get medicine for his baby is worth rooting for. At some point, Powell’s star quality stops mitigating any perceived unlikability and must do the opposite: Because he’s a steady, concise presence, it’s easy to ignore how much unnecessary gilding the story does to further valorize him.
That neediness, among other qualities, makes the whole project an odd match for Wright, even as he takes to his assignment with characteristic gusto. The Running Man is often mordantly funny, especially in its crackerjack first hour, but it’s not especially clever, and cleverness tends to be the filmmaker’s stock in trade. It’s his gift and curse here. One moment, it empowers him to interrupt a tightly wound escape scene with a wonderfully simple, ridiculous pun. In another, the antsiness of searching for the next big flourish appears to overwhelm any patience for building up an atmosphere of noirish paranoia during Richards’ 12-hour head start.
Or maybe Wright is just overwhelmed by the obligations of the film’s blunt-force commentary. Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall attempt to translate some very 40-years-ago ideas about mass-media, some prescient (phone-snitching as a form of audience participation in a cruel game show of life; deepfakes created in the blink of an eye) and some less so (keeping an emphasis on “ratings” rather than, say, “views” or “shares”). Weirdly, the movie’s closest parallel to modern digital video recalls the style of paranoia-saturated YouTube conspiracy videos. Here, secrets of The Running Man and its nefarious parent Network are unveiled by a masked truth-teller performing in front of cheesy but audience-appealing homemade graphics. It’s neat to see that aesthetic filtered through an analog source—because the usual digital methods of production and distribution are too easy to spy on, these videos really are on video—but given the participatory misinformation streaming through the internet at present, the conception of the homegrown truth-teller plays like expired, late-2000s idealism. The quasi-revolutionary zines produced by Elton (Michael Cera), a rebel who briefly houses Richards in his booby-trapped home, at least have genuine nostalgia on their side. Neither version of the people’s media, however, feels particularly compatible with any greater satire of the moment.
Of course, our moment keeps rushing further and further downhill, and to some extent, Wright probably just wanted to make some invigorating pop entertainment. The movie succeeds on that level more often that not, at least until it overstays its welcome in a distended, herky-jerk final half-hour. (Fitting that a climactic sequence involves some trouble landing a plane.) Supporting players like Wright’s former Scott Pilgrim Cera and a gregarious Colman Domingo playing the brazen host of The Running Man are outsized without going full cartoon. There are moments where Wright’s gift for blending the real-world physicality of slapstick with the fantasy enhancements of CG make it seem like he could turn into a legitimately strong action director. Anyone who saw Hot Fuzz might have already had that inkling. But so far—much like Adam McKay, who worked on the Ant-Man Wright left when he realized it wouldn’t really feel like his movie—he continues to prove more adept at tightly weaving his thematic concerns into genre-friendly comedy. Making a muscular, fun-enough adaptation of The Running Man is at once beneath him and beyond him.
Director: Edgar Wright
Writers: Michael Bacall, Edgar Wright
Starring: Glen Powell, Josh Brolin, Colman Domingo, Jayme Lawson, Michael Cera, Lee Pace
Release Date: November 14, 2025
