British director, Edgar Wright, says he read Stephen King’s 1982 novel, The Running Man, when he was a teenager. Decades later, he has fulfilled a dream of making it into a movie. It’s the second adaptation of the book, following a 1987 film by Paul Michael Glaser (better known as Starsky of Starsky & Hutch fame) with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role. Although any film with Arnie has its own ineluctable charm, the 1987 version is pretty trashy. It also diverges so far from the novel that it’s largely a different story, which motivated Wright to attempt a more faithful reworking.
By all accounts this is exactly what he’s done, although I wasn’t prepared to read the novel to find out. Stephen King may have millions of dedicated fans, but I find his prose virtually unreadable – which is not to say that his books can’t be successfully adapted for the screen. Hitchcock made classic movies from pulp fiction, and King’s tales have served as the basis for acclaimed features such as Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), and The Shankshaw Redemption (1994).
Given his proven track record with sharp, original entertainments such as Baby Driver (2017) or Last Night in Soho (2021), I was looking forward to Wright’s take on The Running Man. As is so often the case, a sense of anticipation proved treacherous. Wright has assembled all the desirable elements of a blockbuster sci-fi action film, but the results are strangely uninvolving. As usual there’s a soundtrack packed with classic pop songs, including (inevitably) ‘Keep on Running’ by the Spencer Davis Group. There’s some clever dialogue, no shortage of hair-raising escapes and pursuits, brilliant cinematography and CGI, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching a cartoon.