The Running Man (2025)

Rated R for a lot of ultraviolence.  Like, what are the two grossest violent acts that a movie can do?   Gross eye stuff and someone getting their Achilles cut, right?  Both of those things happen.  Keep that as your gauge for what to expect in this movie.  There's a lot of death, most of it catching you off guard.  There's also some rear nudity, drug use, and blurred sex things.  It's meant to be a shocking post-apocalypse / comment on current misery.  Oh, and language, I guess?

DIRECTOR:  Edgar Wright

This is the longest it has taken me to see an Edgar Wright movie. Do you understand how excited I get when they announce an Edgar Wright movie?  He's my favorite living director.  The man is an absolute genius and it was a low-key crime waiting to see this on home video.  Yeah, I should have been going to the movie theater to see it so I could boost the very limited box office that this movie got.  Like, I actually pang with guilt right now, which is probably unhealthy.  Still, I did pre-order the 4K version of this movie, which also makes me feel guilty because that means that both Paramount and Amazon made money off of me.  It is very hard to be a consumer in 2026.

There was a minute where I thought that this was going to be Edgar Wright's dud.  The thing that keeps on bringing me back to Edgar Wright movies is the fact that they are so meticulously planned.  They are tight films.  And, while I can say that The Running Man, might be his loosy-goosiest movie out of a run of near perfect films, he's definitely the guy who made this movie.  For those students (none of them?  I think the answer is "none of them") who follow my blog, Edgar Wright might be the prime example of auteur theory.  The reason that I was hesitant about The Running Man is that Wright does play it cooler with this film.  Heck, it almost doesn't feel like an Edgar Wright movie until the "Running Man" show within the story starts.  Once Ben gets to the studio and the action starts, there's this language of cinema that really starts.  It's funny, because Hot Fuzz exists as a film.  For those unaware, Hot Fuzz is Edgar Wright's send up of the action movie genre.  It's not a parody.  But it definitely rides the line between parody and satire.  Everything you need to know about Wright's thoughts on action movies can be seen in Hot Fuzz.  But, ultimately, Hot Fuzz has the benefit of having a meta narrative there.  It is allowed to not be an action movie in its own right because it is commenting on the action genre.  The Running Man, however, doesn't have the benefit of hiding behind anything.

As an action movie in its own right (hah!  Wright!), it's incredible.  Now, I have to say that I had the bro-iest time watching this movie with a bunch of guys while eating Taco Bell on a pretty large screen.  It's the way that this movie needs to be watched.  I don't think that I've yelled at the screen more in the past decade than I did at The Running Man.  The conceit is simple enough:  Everyone is trying to kill Ben Richards.  He has 30 days to survive an all-out onslaught of everyone coming at him and that's a good time.  It's the thing that John Wick 3 was supposed to do and they nerfed that pretty quick.  (Note:  I'm actually a fan of John Wick 3, so leave me alone.) But this is a movie that delivers on the promise.  And the weirdest thing, most of the movie sticks to the book.  I mean, it's not a one-for-one.  It's weird that there is a book for this, considering how action heavy it is.  It's even weirder that I own it and have read it.  (Not that it's weird that I've read my own copies of books.  It's actually something I try to take great consideration in doing and pride myself on trying to read everything I own.) But as an action movie that happens to be an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, it's pretty darned solid.  It does the job and then some.  And this coming from someone who is meh on Glen Powell.

Okay, that's not fair to Glen Powell.  The man is handsome as can be.  He's charming and reads as strong-male-lead.  What do I need?  I don't know.  He does the job really well as Ben Richards, especially when the story gets a bit sillier.  Powell, actually might be a little bit more quirky than we allow him to be in movies.  One of the ideas behind The Running Man is the notion that Richards has access to a few different costumes that let him hide in plain sight.  When Richards is punching and kicking his way out of problems, it really doesn't matter that Powell is playing Richards.  Any handsome action star will do.  But in those sillier moments, which are played for laughs, Powell actually holds his own pretty nicely.  The Running Man almost begs its cast to simultaenously take the film seriously and to also take the mickey out of it.  Like, Ben Richards is so over-the-top of an action protagonist.  I described Richards to a friend who showed up late and I was catching him up as "the angriest hero ever."  He's a good guy who keeps getting angry at injustice.  And, golly!, is Powell good at that stuff.  Could someone else have played him?  Yeah, probably.  I don't want to be a jerk.  I want to advocate for Glen Powell really strongly.  I hate dissing someone's performance, especially when there wasn't anything inherently wrong with it.  But I will acknowledge that this might not be the film that makes me think twice about Glen Powell.  (I'm sorry, Mr. Powell.  You are doing a fine job.  It's probably just me.) 

But, as usual, I can't help but love the political elements of The Running Man.  Yeah, those beats are in the book.  (Side note: I never saw the last Running Man movie with Arnold.  I can't comment on that.) Golly, if Edgar Wright didn't capture what it is to be a fan of Fox News and conservative media.  Could I make this a story about how gullible audiences are in general?  I mean, sure.  But you really have to look at The Running Man sideways to think that this is a both-sides issue.  The audience of Free-Vee are visceral and violent.  They are quick to believe AI and fight against their own success.  Everything draped in red and the entire look of The Running Man screams Fox News.  Like, this is a world where the rich manipulate the poor into supporting multi-millionaires.  I guess someone out there is probably grousing that this lib writing this blog don't see the facts in front of him, but this reads as a criticism of the right far more than it does a criticism of the left.  When we see Elton's mom refer to someone as a "Welf", it's all the commentary on how the right demonizes people who are poor.  Yeah, I don't even know why I'm trying to fight this battle with an imagined audience.  "The Running Man" show tells its viewers that Ben is a traitor who sold secrets to the Communists for a few bucks.  It labels its contestants as people abusing the system and cop-killers so that people will fear and hate them harder.  In a way, this was a waste of a paragraph outside the fact that I'm loudly applauding Edgar Wright for being so forthwith about how he lambasted conservative media.

As good as this movie is from an action movie perpective, the side characters are what make it.  First of all, can I tell you how happy I am that Edgar Wright and Michael Cera are still a thing?    Golly, just remembering the good ol' days of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World made me happy all over again.  But Cera steals the film.  He's got a not-nothing part in this movie and if I couldn't be critical of myself while watching the Cera stuff, I would be wildly ignorant.  If much of the movie is a critique of the right's audience, my stupid desperation to become a martyr for the cause is epitomized in Cera's character.  It's so over-the-top, but it is over-the-top in a movie that welcomes that kind of stuff.  He's so good.  Coupled with him is Martin Herlihy's Tim and you are reminded that Edgar Wright knows how comic timing works.  Like, these characters are so funny in a movie that loves just to have fun.  

But I do have to talk about the end of the movie.  See, Stephen King can't write an ending.  I don't hate-hate the end of The Running Man novel.  But I also can say that it seems somehow end-stop awkward.  It feels like Edgar Wright wrote an ending for me and for me alone.  It's for the people who read the book and were noticing how darned close the book and the movie were and wanted something else.  Because the book is a bummer of an end.  Since I am talking about the end of the movie, I do have to put a rare SPOILER WARNING, just because I'm going to spell it out.  The end of the movie still seems to have Ben's family murdered by the evil corporation.  He still is about to fly his plane into the studio to end it all. But, apparently, we still have a stigma about flying planes into buildings.  So the movie gave us an overly optimistic ending.  Ben takes down the corporation and starts a revolution (which doesn't feel realistic considering how easily manipulated the Running Man audience is).  His family, for some reason, got all their money and moved on.  The execution of his family was all AI.  It's just stuff that takes some of the umph out of some shocking moments.  And for a hot second, I liked it...until I was called out on it.  And my buddy was right.  It was too happy.  It took a lot of the meat out of important moments and it shouldn't have done it.  

But with the book ending, there is something hopeless about the whole notion.  As much as The Running Man is silly, there's still this ominous feeling that this is the way that the world is going.  Without having any chance of fighting back against the Rupert Murdocks of the world, why watch a movie like this?  I don't know.  I don't love the ending, but I kind of get why we got what we got.

Still, the movie is insanely fun and Edgar Wright is still batting a thousand with me.  Get some Taco Bell, crack open a (disgusting) Liquid Death, and enjoy the crap out of this movie.