Poor Glen Powell can’t land a quality-calibre role to save his life. That or he likes starring in this kind of popcorn crap.
One thing’s for sure: With Edgar Wright directing, The Running Man (Paramount, 11.7) couldn’t get much cheaper or more thoughtless.
Powell plays the Arnold Schwarzenegger role, of course…a featured slot on “The Running Man”, a highly-rated game show in which contestants are chased by killers all over the map, the idea being to escape a jail term and win money. (That was the deal, at least, in the 1987 original.)
Bellowing TV emcee in red-sequin jacket: “This is America, goddamit, and we don’t put up with no bullshit!”
Come again?
HE clarification: This is America, goddamit, and we not only put up with bullshit 24/7, we revel in it…it’s our spiritual mother’s milk.
The 38-year-old Schwarzenegger version is “set in a dystopian United States between 2017 and 2019, featuring a television show where convicted criminal ‘runners’ must escape death at the hands of professional killers.” Loosely based on Stephen King‘s “The Running Man”, published in ’82 and written under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman.
There’s no greater shoveller of empty, thoughtless, glossy bullshit-for-glossy-bullshit’s sake than Wright. Whatever social or psychological undercurrents the King book may have had back in ’82, Wright (who cowrote the script with Michael Bacall) will erase them in this November release. For Wright is a 16-year-old in the body of a 51-year-old director.