Too much run, not enough fun: A review of ‘Running Man’

It wasn’t great, but it certainly knew what it was, serving up mindless pulp entertainment to an audience that may or may not have known it was being made fun of at the same time. Disappointingly average at the box office, it earned a bit of cult classic cred eventually.

Englishman Edgar Wright, who is legendary in the industry for his Cornetto Trilogy consisting of “Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz” and “The World’s End,” seemed like a perfect match to remake it. Wright’s clever writing and unique visual style always work to subvert traditional genre filmmaking. “Running Man” was ripe for Cornetto-fication.

Alas, this new take doesn’t work. The script by Wright and Michael Bacall (“Scott Pilgrim” and the “Jump Street” movies) hews much closer to the original source material, an extremely dark novel written by Stephen King under his grittier pseudonym Richard Bachman. The book was a grim statement about totalitarian states and how they placate the masses through bloody spectacle on television.

Ben Richards (Glen Powell) is a desperate man with a sick kid and no prospects for work. There is no safety net, no universal health care and no SNAP. To save his child, he ends up entering a dangerous game show where for 30 days a team of assassins and law enforcement will try to kill him. Each day Ben survives, he earns money. For every assassin he kills, he earns more money. Additionally, viewers and audience members are incentivized by cash prizes to assist in the hunt by calling in his whereabouts.

All of it is being filmed and broadcast, and is the No. 1 show akin to a weekly Super Bowl. This is the violent endgame of reality TV, where desperate people risk and lose their lives for sport and gaming, while the studio uses it to appease the coarse appetites of its audience and probably sell lots of ads.

The novel and this new faithful adaptation work overly hard to poke at the various ills of the world, targeting income inequality, corporate malfeasance and the dulling of minds through entertainment. One media conglomerate is completely unchecked by the law. In fact, the entertainment industry *is* the government, running every aspect of life.

Yes, it’s very dystopian, but “Running Man” beats this message over your head constantly. This incessantly joyless commentary saps the fun out of the affair, and frankly, the story puts you in a bad mood. It’s so full of rage while trying to lay siege to the evils of society, it ironically fails to do its main job — to entertain.

Nothing illustrates this more than Powell’s performance. He is a charming, affable actor who has been building a pile of leading man bona fides lately. Somehow the filmmakers have accomplished the improbable task of making him unlikable. As a result, his attempts at levity, weighed down by the story’s dour rucksack, never really reach the finish line. The negativity drags the entire affair down with him.

It’s unfortunate, because somewhere here there’s a great movie. Wright’s team built a sturdy foundation of production design, audio and world-building. Perhaps it would have been better to follow the style of the corny 1980s adaptation rather than the ultra-serious source novel. In particular, the scenes with Coleman Domingo, Josh Brolin and Michael Cera should have been the tonal baseline of “Running Man.”

That would have earned a spot on the podium.