In the first shot of The Running Man, protagonist Ben Richards looks directly at the camera and declares, “I’m not angry.” Well, actually, Richards is looking through a window during this opening, staring out at the factory where he once worked but now must beg for a second chance at his old job. The rejection that soon follows will lead him to becoming a contestant on the titular game show where a man runs. Until he dies.Still, this play of images, and the fact that Ben Richards is lying about his feelings as he looks out a window—all while Glen Powell the actor looks toward us, the audience—captures the play of realities that makes Edgar Wright‘s update of The Running Man urgent and unique.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Like both the 1982 Stephen King novel and the 1987 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Wright’s The Running Man follows bad-tempered Ben Richards as he becomes a contestant on the titular game show and, eventually, a reluctant revolutionary. Like fellow runners Jansky (Martin Herlihy) and Laughlin (Katy O’Brian), Richards must try to survive for 30 days, earning cash rewards for each day he avoids being killed by not just the highly-trained hunters, led by the masked McCone (Lee Pace), but also by any citizen eager to claim a bounty.Along the way, Ben receives help from a cast of odd-balls, which include black market merchant Molie (William H. Macy), super-fan and analyst Bradley (Daniel Ezra), revolutionary Elton (Michael Cera), and middle-class captive Amelia (Emilia Jones). As Richards adopts disguises and moves from town to town, he’s tracked by camera drones that broadcast his actions every night on a show hosted by Bobby T. (Colman Domingo) and overseen by smarmy producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin).Not unlike Mike Flannagan‘s Doctor Sleep, Wright’s The Running Man both adapts a King novel while also riffing on a fairly unfaithful ’80s Hollywood iteration—and sometimes with uneven results. With his mask and beret, McCone plays more like a supervillain than the upscale antagonist in King’s book, and he does lead a quintet of beefy hunters. But gone are Fireball, Captain Freedom, and the other costumed killers that Schwarzenegger battled.Although the shredded body he shows off during a fun escape sequence makes Powell’s hero just as unbelievable as Arnold’s as a man living in poverty, this Richards better fits King’s depiction of a man mad at the world. That rage only intensifies when his wife Shelia’s (Jayme Lawson) waitressing job veers toward sex work and still does not generate enough to buy proper meds for their daughter.But as stated and re-stated in an incredibly clunky script by Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright, Powell’s Richards looks out for his fellow man, repeatedly stopping to help beleaguered folks along the way. The shift away from the loner that King imagined helps make Wright’s adaptation work, for two reasons. First, it better fits Powell’s skill set as an actor. Even though he’ll state his anger in insults, sneers, and flipped birds, Powell cannot stop the twinkle in his eye. He has a natural charm that no amount of post-explosion grit can diminish, or how many times he fantasizes about knocking out Killian’s too-white teeth.That charisma pairs with the second reason that the softer Richards works, because it makes him feel unreal in a cinematic way. When King released The Running Man in 1982, under the pen name Richard Bachman, America had just three television networks. But it also had a reservoir of working-class anger that only intensified as the economic crises that plagued the Carter era made way for Ronald Reagan’s administration and its self-satisfied embrace of free-market capitalism. For King, there was a clear analogue between the spectacle of game shows and the rhetoric of deregulation and trickle-down economics that Reagan sold to the nation with his Hollywood smile. The result is a bleak work, one angry at television’s ability to obscure the truth but still convinced that the truth is out there.Edgar Wright’s take comes at a time when we’re surrounded by screens in our pockets, cars, and homes, each with access to endless channels. Deepfakes and editing allow the average person to create their own reality, easily dismissing inconvenient facts as “fake news,” resulting in a post-truth age. Furthermore, Wright’s work has never been concerned with the truth. From his breakout series Spaced through Last Night in Soho, Wright’s maximalist style blurs fiction and reality. The characters of Shaun, Scott Pilgrim, and Baby don’t just express their feelings via the media they love, they seem to live within it.The Running Man takes place in a world saturated by media, which serves as a tool for fascism. So while Wright indulges in his usually bravado filmmaking to create the primetime Running Man TV show, powered by Domingo’s electric performance as the host, he tamps down his style when focusing on our hero. This isn’t to say that he makes Richards’ scenes boring, certainly not when augmented by the costumes by Julian Day and production design by Marcus Rowland, both of which recall the dystopias of 1980s blockbusters. But outside of a delightful sequence in which Daniels and Michael Cera’s Elton unleash a series of Home Alone-style traps on invading cops, Wright shoots the action in competent but anonymous cinematic language.That is, until the ending, which won’t be spoiled here. Suffice it to say that the film could be read as running even further away from the despair of King’s original conclusion than the 1987 movie did, drowning the viewers with Hollywood saccharine. Or it could be read as the type of hyper-real nightmare described in Jean Baudrillard’s philosophy, in which truth gets buried under layers of screen images.The meaning of those final moments make the difference between The Running Man being a fun but dumb exercise in blockbuster filmmaking or a true nightmare of totalitarian media control. The interpretation all comes down to the challenge that Richards makes when he looks at what might be nothing and might be you the viewer and declares his anger. Are you angry? If so, then The Running Man might make you angrier; it could also simply entertain you; or it might just take away your hope altogether.The Running Man hits theaters on Nov. 14, 2025.The post The Running Man Review: Edgar Wright Reinvents Stephen King for the Post-Truth Age appeared first on Den of Geek.