The Running Man

Edgar Wright has taken Stephen King’s 1982 novel and made the version the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film did not: closer to the book, poorer, angrier, with the hero’s family put back. Ben Richards (Glen Powell) cannot get work, his child is ill, and the only door still open is the Network’s, where the most watched programme in America pays a fortune to anyone who can stay alive for thirty days while being hunted. He signs the form. What follows is a fast, expensive chase film that is a pleasure for an hour and a chore by the end, and that keeps telling us what it means instead of letting us feel it.

Powell is cast against his grin, mostly to good effect. He plays Richards as a man permanently a second away from hitting someone, jaw set, eyes down, and when he does turn on the charm it reads as a tactic rather than a habit. Colman Domingo’s Bobby T., the host, is the film’s best piece of casting: he works a studio crowd like a preacher and a car salesman at once and appears to believe every word. Josh Brolin plays Dan Killian, the producer, in a low voice and a good suit and is scarier for never raising either. Lee Pace, as the lead Hunter Evan McCone, is given almost nothing to say and does a great deal of standing still.

Marcus Rowland’s production design puts this America somewhere between the decade King wrote the book in and next week: bulky television sets, cars with fins, hand-held screens that look built in a hurry and sold dear. Chung Chung-hoon shoots the poor districts in wet orange dark and the Network’s studios in a flat white glare with nowhere to hide, so the two halves of the country never share a colour. Julian Day dresses the people at home in layers and patches and the Network’s people in fabrics that shine. Steven Price’s score is thick synthesiser and drum machine, punched up with songs Wright plainly loves, and the first hour goes at the tempo of a music video.

That first hour is where our fun was. The opening escape, from a rooming house the Hunters have already surrounded, is cut by Paul Machliss so that every door and window has been shown to us before Richards needs it, and when he goes through the wrong one we knew exactly how wrong. We were having a fine time, and then a little ashamed of it, because the film keeps cutting to citizens at home phoning in his position for a bounty, and those citizens are plainly meant to be us. We noticed. We kept watching. That is the point the film wants to make, and it is the only one it makes cleanly.

The trouble is structure. Richards has to keep moving, so every twenty minutes William H. Macy’s Molie, or someone like him, hands him a new name and a new face and the film starts again in a new place with a new chase. Michael Cera’s Elton Perrakis brings the second half a jolt of nervous comedy the film could have used more of. Emilia Jones, as a member of the public called Amelia Williams who gets pulled into the chase, is given a whole change of heart in the time most films give a car crash. The screenplay, by Michael Bacall and Wright, has Killian explain what television is for at least twice, and the second time we had already got it. Then the final stretch makes a choice we will not describe, hedges it, and the hedging shows. By the two-hour mark we were checking our watches.

Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007) and Baby Driver (2017) each had a rhythm nobody else could have cut. Here, for long stretches, there is nothing on screen that only Wright could have done, and the jokes are fewer and land softer than in anything he has made. The reviews so far are split almost exactly down the middle, and we sit in the middle too, not out of caution but because the film is half of a good one.

See it in company, with the sound up, on a night when you want to watch a man run and do not much mind why. Lower your hopes at the two-hour mark. It runs 133 minutes and carries a 15.