Title – The Running Man (2025)

Director – Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead)

Cast – Glen Powell, Josh Brolin, Colman Domingo, Emilia Jones, Michael Cerra, William H. Macy

Plot – In a sad dystopian future where most struggle day to day, working class man Ben Richards (Powell) in desperation signs up to a game show that requires contestants survive 30 days on the run with the failure to not do so resulting in death.  

“Survive 30 days while the world hunts you down”

Review by Eddie on 14/11/2025

Cutting straight to the point, The Running Man is quite easily one of the year’s most disappointing non-events and a major cause for concern for its director Edgar Wright, a filmmaker who has lost a major creative spark over the past decade or so.

With a budget of over $100 million dollars and a more than capable cast that’s falling in behind leading man of the moment Glen Powell, Wright’s remake of Paul Michael Glaser’s cult 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger and adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same name had more than enough tools at its disposal to be a highly entertaining end of season blockbuster experience but as an end product, this long in the tooth two hour plus thrill fails to provide the thrills, spills or comedic goodness that might have made it prosper.

Arguably the least Edgar Wright feeling/seeming feature film we’ve seen yet from the British ex-pat, with nothing here showcasing the spark and creativity that shone in his original Cornetto trilogy or the likes of the visually inventive Scott Pilgrim vs. The World or box office smash Baby Driver, it’s hard to understand how Wright had supposedly been at work on this feature for more than a decade with Running Man’s final iteration here being the type of product that any hack director for hire could have delivered for a Hollywood studio.

The core concept of King’s original book and the world in which Richard’s finds himself forced to live in all opens up a raft of possibilities, but everything found in Running Man plays out entirely to script with all the action beats and proposed tension that could have been created from this dystopian social commentary thriller laying somewhere on scribbled notes on a floor.

Front and centre to this lacklustre affair is Powell who gets his greatest test yet as a solo lead and it’s hard to give the talented performer a pass here as the quick to anger Richard’s with the well-liked acting left wanting in a lot of respects and struggling to bring this hard to love character to life when he spends most of the film yelling or sweating his way through proceedings.

Most of the films other cast members don’t fare much better with the likes of Josh Brolin, William H. Macey and Lee Pace getting little to work with as Colman Domingo as over the top game show host Bobby T and Michael Cera as conspiracy nut Elton Perrakis the only performers who were really allowed to or really wanted to bring the fun to an otherwise mostly po-faced affair.

Seemingly destined to be one of the years more notable box-office duds, if my prime-time screening with one other patron and middling reviews are the standard, Running Man is a sadly pointless exercise that fails to bring the spark and imagination required to stand-out from the pack or justify its expensive existence.

Final Say –

After a few misses’ prior that have culminated here in a notably pedestrian way, Edgar Wright’s new take on The Running Man is a D.O.A event that harms the director’s reputation as well as that of his leading man who fails his biggest test yet.

2 cans of Monster out of 5