How many goddamn times do I have to learn not to get overhyped for a movie? Yes, I realize it’s an occupational hazard — I’m a movie blogger, I love movies, of course I’m going to get excited for an upcoming film every now and then. But I’ve lost track of how many times my heart has gotten broken over a movie that wasn’t as good as I had hoped.

I recently saw The Running Man (1987), and I found it to be a schlocky Verhoeven ripoff made with half the talent and intellect. Not that there’s anything wrong with the schlock, that’s what the fans love about it. Trouble is, I’ve also read the original Stephen King book. And that movie was nowhere near what the book delivered.

So here’s The Running Man (2025), which was made and marketed as a more faithful adaptation of the book. Fantastic. We’ve got the white-hot Glen Powell starring, which is wonderful. And it’s coming to us from Edgar Wright, my longtime favorite director. Holy shit, sign me up.

And sure enough, I honestly did have a fun time with the movie. But wow, does this one have problems.

We lay our scene in a corporate hellscape, where pretty much all of American government and economy has been privatized by The Network. The corporate overlords control all facets of manufacturing, production, and delivery. The corporate overlords control the police force and law enforcement, while also running an all-encompassing surveillance state. Class disparity is brutally enforced by way of gated communities, and those outside the gates are kept in such poverty that the only real way they can make money is to compete on brutally violent game shows. Of course The Network also produces and broadcasts the game shows on FreeVee sets that keep the viewers under constant surveillance. I might further add that the shows are selectively edited and altered with cutting-edge CGI, so the audience only ever sees what the producers want them to see.

In a great many ways, it’s like reality finally caught up with the source text. Sure, there is a slight family resemblance to the ’87 adaptation (complete with an awesomely ingenious shout-out to Schwarzenegger), but the gaudy excess is here delivered with a gritty kind of 2025 edge.

Anyway, Powell plays Ben Richards, a man who made himself unemployable when he dared to speak up for the safety of a fellow employee. Unable to afford medicine for his sick daughter, Richards tries out for the game shows and gets himself stuck on “The Running Man”.

The challenge is simple: Survive for 30 days while the whole damn nation is hunting him down. If Richards kills one of the Network’s goons, he gets a bonus. If he kills one of the Network’s specialized hunters, he gets a bigger bonus. The longer he survives, the more money he gets. But if an ordinary civilian reports his location or successfully kills Richards, then they get the reward.

In theory, I get how this all sounds very “Hunger Games”. In practice, it’s more like The Purge. What we’ve got here is a way for upstanding members of society to feel better about themselves while disposing of undesirables (read: criminals and freeloaders who can’t or won’t make an honest living). The only real difference here is that unlike the Purge, this setup allows citizens to take part by calling their beloved corporate overlords if they don’t want to get their own hands dirty or put themselves in any real danger.

Regardless, the effect is the same: The lower and middle classes put in so much effort fighting and demonizing and killing each other that they can’t put up any meaningful resistance against the corporate overlords.

Then again, it’s a universal truth that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. There are some who believe the Network’s smear campaign, led to believe that Richards is a demon who needs to be put down. Some others are too desperate for the money, or perhaps the fame of getting on FreeVee. But then there are those who badly want or need to believe that a man from the slums can beat the odds. With every passing day that Richards survives, he’s getting built up into a kind of folk hero that could only exist in a mass media age.

Naturally, Richards’ surging popularity means an increase in the Network’s ratings. Which leads to the question of what exactly the corporate overlords plan to do about this.

With all of that said, you might’ve clued into a major problem with this movie: There’s too damn much going on. While I commend the filmmakers’ ambitions in using the source text to comment on so many different facets of the social media rage-fueled late-stage capitalist hellscape we are presently in, the filmmakers cast their net too wide. They take on way more topics and themes than they could effectively juggle. This is most clearly visible in the inconsistent development arc of our protagonist, whose competence, intelligence, ignorance, and moral outrage fluctuate with the needs of the plot.

Unfortunately, the other big problem is inherent in the source material. This game doesn’t take place in a self-contained arena like the ’87 film — this is a “road trip” story in which the protagonist runs from one scene/character to the next. This unfortunately means that the tones and themes vary wildly from one vignette to the next.

On the other hand, every last actor here came to play. Powell turns in a dynamic lead performance. Josh Brolin gleefully plays the chief antagonist as a shit-eating hate sink. Coleman Domingo chews the scenery like only he can. Michael Cera is a goddamn laugh riot. Lee Pace once again puts his villainous chops to good use, though his mask and makeup scarring do most of the work for him. William H. Macy, Katy O’Brian, Emilia Jones, and Daniel Ezra all turn in memorable performances.

It’s the cast that kept this movie entertaining, in addition to the energetic direction that Wright always brings. Unfortunately, the longer this film kept going, the more problems and red flags started to pile up. So it really all came down to the ending and whether the film could wrap up before it got buried in its own shortcomings.

So naturally, the ending is where it all falls apart. Edgar, buddy, what were you thinking?

For the first two hours, the film had gotten a lot of mileage out of following the general structure and spirit of the book. And then they chickened out by changing the ending. But that’s not the bad part. The bad part is that the filmmakers tried to contrive a happy ending, and they could only do that by breaking the whole damn movie.

See, it’s a huge part of the movie that the Network is inherently untrustworthy. Anything they say could be a lie and anything they show could be an elaborate CGI fabrication. The filmmakers got the bright idea of using this to justify their happy ending, with the unfortunate side effect that nobody — not the audience, not the characters, NOBODY — has any idea what the fuck actually happened.

The maniacs tried so hard to faithfully adapt the text, only to try and bolt a happy ending onto a story that didn’t get a happy ending. And it broke the whole fucking story so hard, they gave the movie something like three or four alternate endings all happening at once. The plot, the themes, every possible reason to take this movie seriously, all shot to hell in those incoherent last closing minutes.

What we’ve got here are two different adaptations of “The Running Man” that tried and failed at balancing intelligent media satire with fun action/comedy. The difference is that the ’87 film seemed more acutely aware of its own limitations, and so erred on the side of gaudy action/comedy. By comparison, the 2025 take goes too hard in too many directions and ultimately fails at pretty much all of them.

The Running Man (2025) is a fun time for the action scenes and the cast is a blast to watch, but that’s not enough to stick the landing. The best I can do for this one is a home video recommendation.