A 'Running Man' that mostly limps

Adaptation of the Stephen King 1982 novel may be too relevant to be any fun.

- AMY NICHOLSON FILM CRITIC

GLEN POWELL'S Ben Richards plays for the highest of stakes.

Look around lately and 20th century science fiction has become 21st century fact.

Real life in the year 2025 - the date in which Stephen King set his 1982 novel "The Running Man" involves technological surveillance, corporate feudalism, infotainment propaganda and extreme inequality, all things that his story about a grisly game show predicted.

King, like the great sci-fi authors Philip K. Dick and George Orwell before him, was writing a cautionary tale. But the decades since have seen people take their bleak ideas as a blueprint, like when Elon Musk bragged on X that the Tesla Cybertruck is “what Bladerunner would have driven," missing the point that we don't want to live in a dystopia (and that Bladerunner isn't even Harrison Ford's name in "Blade Runner").

The timing couldn't be better and worse for Edgar Wright to remake "The Running Man," only to put no fire into it. He and his co-writer Michael Bacall have adapted a fairly faithful version of the book, unlike the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger meathead extravaganza. (The only way to suffer through that one is if you imagine it's a parody of pundriven testosterone flicks.) Tellingly, they've left off the year 2025 and only lightly innovated the production design with spherical drones.

But there's little urgency or outrage. Instead of a funhouse mirror of what could be, it's merely a smudged reflection of what is.