It’s hard to really pin down the tone of The Running Man. Directed by the stylish, often funny, and occasionally terrifying Edgar Wright, the new film takes what could be accused of being a feature-length Black Mirror premise, and turns it into a satisfying, heartwarming movie that is also one of the bleakest dystopic thrillers in ages. How can The Running Man both capture the camp of the 1987 adaptation and also be its own thing? How can it make relevant social commentary without going too far? And, for god’s sake, how can it be extremely faithful to the Stephen King source material while not turning into a total bummer?It’s unclear how Wright pulls off this magic trick, but leading man Glen Powell, doing his best I’m-not-Ryan-Gosling impression, certainly helps. In the early 2000s, a remake of a sci-fi horror/novel like this would have starred Tom Cruise or Colin Farrell (Minority Report, the second Total Recall), and we would have all had to deal with that level of hyper-earnestness. Thankfully, Powell’s charm is part of what carries things through, but there’s something else The Running Man has going for it: a simple, yet horrifying premise, executed with precision, and just enough outrageous twists to keep you guessing.The Running Man mostly follows the beats of the Stephen King novel, but gives it a crowdpleasing edge. | Paramount PicturesThe Running Man is based on the 1982 book of the same name, published by Stephen King under his pen name Richard Bachman. (There’s an Easter egg early in the movie for a restaurant called Bachman’s for all you super King nerds.) Bachman was a persona King invented, for a time, that seemed to contain some of his more intense books. The first Bachman book was 1977’s Rage, now out of print at King’s request, since the school shooter plotlines of that novel were too similar to what became a horrific occurrence in real life. As a book, The Running Man is extremely bleak, which the new film captures in detailed ways that the 1987 version only homaged.As in the book, The Running Man focuses on a working-class guy named Ben Richards (Powell) who, because of unfair labor policies, has been blacklisted from various types of blue-collar jobs. His sick two-year-old daughter is desperately in need of decent medication, and his wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) is working double shifts at a seedy cocktail lounge to help the family get by. The movie dials down some of King’s darker details here; in the book, Shelia has resorted to prostitution, whereas in the film, it's made clear that she wouldn’t cross that line. This is a smart choice on the part of Wright and co-screenwriter Michael Bacall, and it serves as a microcosm for the thrust of the film, especially the ending. Where King was content to make a statement without providing hope, the new film wants its audience to feel a little better about the protagonists, both at the beginning and end.Desperate to fix the situation, Richards enters himself into the most popular reality show in America: The Running Man, a survival game in which the titular person is hunted for sport. From here, the details of how one plays the game are again much closer to the King text than the 1987 film, including the rule that runners have to mail messages via analog videotape. In this way, there’s something anachronistic about the new Running Man, which requires one to buy a sort of alternate type of history. Characters are rarely on their portable phones, and instead are content to watch the entirety of Running Man episodes live, and often on large TV sets. The notion of a constant surveillance state is made plain by cameras mounted everywhere in addition to little floating globes, seemingly borrowed from Darth Maul. But people walking around or in crowds are rarely staring at phones, which, let’s face it, would be more realistic.Ben Richards (Glen Powell) trying to survive in The Running Man. | Paramount PicturesThe idea, of course, is brutally simple: Richards has to survive from being hunted down and murdered by not only law enforcement and the professional Hunters, but also by being reported by regular citizens. Strangely, this second thing doesn’t happen near that often as it would in real life, which gives the film an oddly hopeful vibe: A lot of people like Richards enough to not snap a photo of him and make a bunch of money.Is this unrealistic? Yes. Will various other reviewers say that the future America presented by The Running Man is, in fact, close to the world we’re already living in? Of course. But, again, because of the basic throwback ethos of the movie, The Running Man feels less about finding sympathy for Luigi Mangione or justifying real-world violent riots in the name of stopping tyranny. Instead, as Richards states throughout the movie, he’s more interested in protecting his family, not burning down the whole system. Sure, at one point, the character lectures the audience (both real and fictional) to “turn it off” and stop watching horrible content like The Running Man, but this message seems somewhat disingenuous in a film that cost $110 million to make and cost you at least $15 bucks to sit and watch. In other words, The Running Man is best enjoyed when the political allegory isn’t taken too seriously. If anything, King purists, or hyper-political viewers, will find that The Running Man isn’t dark enough. The last third of the film is particularly surprising, but also mildly confounding. As in all versions of the story, the people running the show, Bobby T (Colman Domingo) and Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), can alter the contents of Richards’ video messages to make him say whatever they want. When Richards asks if Killian could just fake the entire show, Killian responds with a laugh, “Believe me, we’ve tried.”Glen Powell and Michael Cera in The Running Man. | Paramount Pictures The Running Man’s quality and enjoyability sit somewhere in this conversation. At times, there is a very realistic, grounded feeling to the entire movie, a hardcore down-in-the-mud dystopian premise taken to the extreme. At other times, it feels like a fake and self-aware farce, in which almost every character that Richards encounters is either a comic relief or a villain. Just to be clear, this isn’t an exaggeration: there are THREE male characters who one could count as goofy sidekicks in The Running Man: Michael Cera’s Elton, Daniel Ezra’s Bradley, and perhaps, most obviously, SNL’s Martin Herlihy as Jansky. Hell, even the ever-watchable Katy O'Brian is hamming it up here, taking on the character of Laughlin, a very different version of Yaphet Kotto’s character of the same name from the 1987 flick. There’s even something a little funny about Lee Pace’s Hunter character, McCone, and his absurdly commercialized weapons.And yet, these goofy characters and sidequests are just as important to making The Running Man watchable in the face of the more heavy-handed serious stuff. Wright is splitting the difference here quite a bit, which for some viewers will make for a tonally incongruent movie. The question is, how much are you willing to accept? The Running Man will make you laugh, cry, and cheer for Ben Richards. But only if you let it.The Running Man hits theaters on November 14.