If you’re trying to make a new adaptation of a Stephen King book that’s also a kind-of remake of a cult sci-fi classic from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ’80s heyday, you might end up a child of two worlds. Edgar Wright’s version of The Running Man aims to do just that, but the trick with trying to hit the center of a Venn diagram is that you might accidentally end up in the middle of the road.
Three Iterations, One Story
The Running Man of 2025 is the product of a few iterations that came before it. Most of its DNA comes from the Stephen King novel written under his early ’80s pseudonym Richard Bachman—a heady piece of speculative sci-fi that’s dark and brooding without much room for hope. But The Running Man is also an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from 1987, from the glory days of campy one-liner action flicks that left most of the meat of their source material off the screen (see also: Total Recall) in favor of extra flash and sizzle.
This makes The Running Man primed for revisiting, but it also makes the latest version difficult to discuss out of context from the book and previous film. On one hand, there’s the much darker source material this movie tries to honor in ways Arnold’s ’80s version didn’t approach. On the other hand, there’s a fun action movie that needs to happen in there somewhere.
Balancing these two factors is where The Running Man doesn’t quite keep up.
Glen Powell’s Action Hero Debut
There is plenty in the movie that works, though. For starters, there’s Glen Powell. The guy is one of the biggest stars on the rise at the moment, and his performance in The Running Man isn’t going to change anybody’s mind about that. This is effectively his first time out as a proper leading man action hero, and it suits him for the most part.
He tops off his anger-forward take on Ben Richards with just the right amount of vulnerability—the thing Harrison Ford made his whole career on. Strong and capable and all of that, but also not trying to hide that he’s in over his head. I think I like the cockier-than-he-deserves-to-be version of Glen Powell—the one from Top Gun: Maverick and Twisters—a little more than this angry everyman, but he still does a solid job.
Powell brings movie-star charisma to a character who needs to be both everyman relatable and compelling enough to carry an action franchise. It’s a tricky balance, and while he doesn’t always nail it, he demonstrates he’s got the chops for this level of leading-man responsibility.
Coming in Too Hot
For me personally, my experience watching The Running Man was another lesson in coming in too hot. I’ve been crazy excited to see this movie since it was announced. Edgar Wright directing this specific movie at this specific time felt almost too specifically perfect. It ticked all my boxes, so the film had a lot to live up to, fair or not.
And while his signature is still on parts of this movie, I think it was missing a full dose of Edgar Wright.
The title sequence, for example, is full of slick shots that very effectively communicate lots of information visually. There’s one in the trailer, with Ben walking through the street past a line of people waiting for a chance to buy medicine. It’s great movement and blocking and composition, and it tells a story all by itself. It’s vintage Edgar Wright.
The drone shot following Ben through the halls of a building the hunters have him trapped in is another one like that. The move isn’t for movement’s sake—it’s rooted in the TV broadcast the film is portraying, and there’s motivation to swoop and dive through the halls that’s both cool to look at and furthers the story.
It’s that kind of visual language that’s made Edgar Wright one of my favorites. But it’s also the sort of storytelling that only happens in fits and spurts throughout the film, with Wright’s fingerprints not really visible for most of the movie.
Colman Domingo Steals Every Scene
The other real standout in the cast is Colman Domingo, who is having an absolute blast as Bobby Thompson, the ringmaster to The Running Man‘s circus. For every bit of the film’s color palette that feels a little drab—going from a gray and imposing near-future dystopian city to the brown and barren countryside—there’s a sparkly jacket draped over Bobby Thompson.
Domingo’s a bright spot to be sure, and serves an important function for the movie. He’s heartless enough to write off the hardships the runners endure and the lies he’s telling about them to stir up the masses with a “hey, that’s showbiz, babe” cockiness. But he’s also savvy enough to navigate the dangerous waters he’s swimming in. Plus he’s charming as hell and looks incredible. He’s a ton of fun deployed in exactly the right way.
Smart Details, Tonal Struggles
There are also tons of great details in the production design that flesh out the world. Little things like a gender-swapped, pin-up girl version of “Auntie Sam” on magazine covers and a fun Easter egg about who’s on the New Dollar bills depict a society given over to its baser instincts. They’re a smart brand of throwaway jokes that try to keep the mood light where they can.
But that’s also the biggest issue with The Running Man of 2025. Thematically, it seems to work against itself sometimes. Like I mentioned up top, there’s a danger when you don’t pick a lane that you might end up in the middle of the road. King’s novel was bleak science fiction that went hard, Schwarzenegger’s film was a campy explosion of satire, and Wright’s version is a little of both but not fully either one.
My read is that it’s a movie doing three things well enough, but not doing any of them as well as it could have had it just focused on one.
Three Approaches, None Fully Realized
First, it’s not bombastic or absurd enough to feel like proper, biting satire. For sci-fi satire to really work, you need to create distance between the work and the real world. The Running Man 2025’s near-future dystopia is a little too near to the present to have much fun with. It’s a world of enormous wealth inequality, health crises, and authoritarian governments that doesn’t just feel “dangerously possible” like when King first wrote about it 40 years ago so much as “uncomfortably familiar.”
So the film’s conceit feels a little too mundane to cast our current society in a different, more questioning light like truly effective satire should.
Second, on the opposite side of the coin, it’s not subtle enough to work as a thrilling melodrama. Every time the film gets heavy, they double down on the weight. The world of Co-Op City on screen is dark, filled with every kind of problem we’re currently facing, from affordable medicine to deepfakes lying to us. They’re problems that deserve weight.
When Powell’s Ben Richards goes to an intense “this is about my family” place of earnestness, however, there’s no release valve. Michael Cera has a moment of lightness in the middle of everybody’s despair during his brief stint in the movie, but it comes and goes quickly.
You can see the thriller part not fully working in Josh Brolin’s villain, Dan Killian. As a network executive tasked with distracting the masses with a modern gladiator arena with open-world flavor, he’s a solid son of a bitch who’s easy to hate, bright white veneers and all. But by the time he has his inevitable come-apart, I didn’t really buy it. There wasn’t much of an arc to his villainy that might have been there had he been able to have as much fun as Colman Domingo chewing up scenery. Either way, had Killian arrived at the end of his story in a more believable way, I think the whole film would’ve been classed up a bit.
Third, I don’t think the action is inventive enough to make The Running Man really sing as an action film. There are fun set pieces for sure—the aforementioned drone shot, and the big bridge explosion from the trailers—but it’s hard out there to make an action movie memorably action-forward these days, and I don’t think The Running Man quite gets there.
And this in particular is not foreign to Edgar Wright’s work. Take Baby Driver, for example. It was a good enough excuse to make incredible car chases. I actually couldn’t tell you much about that movie outside of, “Loved the car chases, I bet they had fun making it.” I don’t think the action in The Running Man has that kind of staying power.
What It Could Have Been
Ultimately, this is a movie that wants to have sharp teeth. The subject matter deserves them, and Glen Powell’s performance as an angry everyman becoming a reluctant revolutionary icon does as well. The statements Stephen King made more than four decades ago about the fickle nature of truth in the media, mass consumption, and unequal distribution of wealth are every bit as relevant today as they were then, so they ought to be taken seriously.
The story of The Running Man, in all of its now three iterations, is a great piece of sci-fi that I, for one, really enjoy. I’m glad it’s being retold. Edgar Wright’s film just seems caught in-between two very different versions of it.
Had Wright fully committed to one approach—the bleak, unflinching King adaptation, the satirical romp, or the pure action spectacle—The Running Man could have been something special. Instead, it’s a solid film that never quite reaches the heights it’s capable of.
The Verdict
The Running Man is getting a 7. It’s a very well put-together film, and more so than not, it’s full of charming performances, clever little details, and some less-outlandish-than-I’d-like social commentary. Even though Edgar Wright’s stamp isn’t clearly on every sequence like some of his previous work, The Running Man sprints where it needs to, giving Glen Powell his first chance to be a full-fledged action hero.
It’s a movie that lives up to its heritage but gets a little tonally caught between the book and its first, more Arnold-y adaptation, and does a few different things pretty well instead of doing one thing really well. It’s a solid movie, one I’m looking forward to watching again, but I don’t think it’s running quite hard enough.
For fans of the source material, the ’87 film, or Edgar Wright’s filmography, there’s enough here to appreciate. But for those hoping this would be the definitive version of this story—the one that finally nails the balance between action, satire, and social commentary—it might leave you wishing it had committed harder to one direction rather than trying to please everyone.
