It’s strange that we got two different films this year that were based on Stephen King novels that he originally published under his pseudonym of “Richard Bachman,” with The Running Man premiering just a few short months after The Long Walk. I haven’t seen the 1987 adaptation of Running Man since I was a kid, but I remember skimming the original text once in my adolescent years and not seeing many similarities, and reading that the earlier film had largely taken only a few concepts from the novel and changed much of the meat of it. Edgar Wright’s new film, based on a cursory examination of the text’s summaries online, hews closer to it, with a few modernizations to account for changing technology, as Bachman/King’s original, despite being set in 2025, couldn’t have foreseen the ways that we’d build our own dystopia. What struck me about this is that although The Long Walk was written when King was a student in the 1960s and was published in 1979, both that narrative and this one focus on a man driven to participate in a widely broadcast, necropolitical bread and circuses-style contest that ends in either death or functionally endless wealth. For The Long Walk, it’s clear that King drew inspiration from the seemingly endless Vietnam War, the first war to be televised. (As a side note, the Latin for “bread and circuses” is panem et circenses, with the Long Walk-inspired Hunger Games taking the word “panem” as the name of the nation in which it takes place.) The origin of what inspired The Running Man is less clear.
Regardless, this made me curious about whether, consciously or unconsciously, King shunted the works in which he expressed rage against an unfair and unjust system into his Bachman-credited works while keeping his King brand spooky (as of the 1977 publication of the first Bachman novel, aptly titled Rage, King had published Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, and The Shining). Rage, which has nothing to do with The Rage: Carrie 2, has become semi-notorious since publication, as to the rise of school shootings in the decades since its publication has haunted King, who removed the book from publication after it became associated with some actual acts of violence. In that novel, main character Charlie Decker retrieves a pistol from his locker after being expelled and goes on a rampage, but he does so with no real ideology and the only clues we get to his reasoning are flashbacks to his abusive childhood.
That’s not quite in the same wheelhouse as Running Man or The Long Walk, but the latter two do share similarities to the 1981 Bachman novel Roadwork, which could best be synopsized as “Charlotte Hollis does a Falling Down.” Roadwork features a man named Dawes whose sentimental attachment to the industrial laundry where he is employed and the house in which he raised his deceased son Charlie leads him on a campaign against the expansion of a highway that will result in both being demolished. He eventually finds himself in a standoff with the police before he detonates the house himself while inside of it, and the epilogue confirms that the highway extension project had only been approved so that the city could build the minimum number of miles to secure future federal funding. Roadwork was a contemporary novel, so it lacked the speculative fiction future setting of the dystopias of The Long Walk or Running Man, but despite a more realistic setting, the protagonist is still a person who, like the boys in the former and the running men in the latter, finds himself forced by an inhumanly callous and bureaucratic system into a path from which there seems to be no escape. It lacks the “being broadcast to the masses” element, but it is replaced by the fact that the piece is bookended by excerpts from a journalist who interviews Dawes both before and during his rampage.
With that frustration with (and ultimate defiance of) the system being a foundational element of most of the Bachman-credited works, and with the globalization of virtual omnipresence of social media creating a world in which most people have willingly submitted themselves to an online surveillance state, it’s not surprising that we would get a Running Man remake (or re-adaptation). And, if you’re going to do it, I can hardly think of a better person to play protagonist Ben Richards than Glen Powell, who has the handsome face and toned body to please a ravenous viewing audience, both those watching the film and the TV—or rather “FreeVee”—show within it. Edgar Wright has made some of my favorite little oddballs over the years; I was a huge fan of his Sean Pegg/Nick Frost/Jessica Hynes-nee-Stephenson TV series Spaced as well as Shawn of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and his Scott Pilgrim adaptation, and even if I was lukewarm on The World’s End and never saw Baby Driver, I was more fond of Last Night in Soho than most. The early reactions to Running Man, many of which expressed frustration with Wright and recommending he re-team with Pegg and Frost, had me worried, but I ultimately had a pretty good time with it. While catching up about recent releases we had seen in the top half of our recent podcast episode, Brandon and I talked about our different reactions to Predator: Badlands, and aligned on the fact that it was the perfect movie for a mid-afternoon beer at an action flick; this is exactly the same experience.
Ben Richards (Powell) is a laborer who has been blacklisted from virtually every job because of “insubordination” like telling a union rep about radiation leakage; that one megacorporation has a monopoly on virtually all industry doesn’t help. When his wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) is planning to hit a third shift at the seedy nightclub where she waitresses so that they can try to get medicine for their ill infant daughter, Ben instead heads off to audition for one of the many game shows that are presented on the megacorp’s FreeVee service. He promises that he’s not foolish enough to try and get on The Running Man, a show in which the contestants must try to stay alive for thirty days while staying ahead of the elite five person “Hunter” team led by the mysterious masked McCone (Lee Pace), the omnipresent “goons” (the corp’s privatized police which have replaced all other law enforcement in the U.S.), and all private citizens, who are incentivized to record and report the Runners with cash prizes. He ends up not having a choice, as he gets slotted to The Running Man after various physical and psychological tests, and he’s talked into accepting the signing bonus that will get baby Cathy in to see a doctor by network exec Dan Killian (Josh Brolin). Killian tells Ben that he thinks he has what it takes to go the distance, and even as he tries to endear himself to Ben by admitting that he says that to all the players but “this time [he] really mean[s] it,” Ben sees right through him, promising that he’ll destroy him in the end. Killian directs him to amp up his rage issues for the camera, and then Ben and the other runners, Laughlin (Katy O’Brian) and Jansky, are introduced to the in-studio and at home audiences by host Bobby T (Colman Domingo), where they’re painted as thieves, welfare parasites, and malcontents, to the jeers and boos of the frothing populace.
The rules are simple. Viewers at home can record and submit footage of the Runners via an app, and they get cash payouts both for confirmed sightings and if their contribution helps “eliminate” the Runner; Runners have to stay alive and on-the-run while recording a ten-minute tape per day and then mailing it in, supposedly anonymously. After a near miss with the Hunters while staying at a similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from YMCA, Richards meets Bradley (Daniel Ezra), a rebel who takes him in as part of the underground resistance and whose online presence as an anonymous exposer of the secrets of the broadcasts means he can provide all the exposition that Ben needs. He helps secret Ben to Elton Parrakis (Michael Cera), another rebel who plans to get Ben to an underground bunker after pre-recording his tapes so that he can lie low, and whose house is booby-trapped to the gills. Ben attempts to get more information out about the real activities of the megacorp, but his tapes are edited before broadcast to show him confessing to having enjoyed killing the goons sent after him and that he literally eats puppies. The longer he stays alive, however, the more the in-universe audience transitions from believing the villainous image that the show paints him as to finding him a bit of a folk hero.
Before Bachman was outed as King, some contemporary critics compared the “two” writers’ work and usually found that although their styles were very similar, Bachman’s endings tended to be more bleak than King’s, which were often dark but ended on an optimistic tone. I’m not sure I really agree; Carrie ends grimly, as does ‘Salem’s Lot, but this apparent discrepancy was highlighted specifically by Steve Brown, the bookstore clerk credited with cracking the case that Bachman and King were the same person, so there must be some merit in that analysis. The recent adaptation of The Long Walk makes minor changes to the ending (mostly regarding who wins) but retains that work’s dark tone. Wright’s reimagining of the finale of King’s Running Man rejects the original climax, in which Ben crashes a stolen jet into the megacorp network building, in favor of having Ben escape the plane’s destruction prior to the plane being destroyed by the megacorp’s missiles so that he can become the figurehead of a revolution. I’m not terribly concerned with textual fidelity, all things considered, but it’s worth noting that all of the Bachman texts have downer endings. Charlie is killed by the police at the climax of Rage, the winner of the titular Long Walk runs toward a specter of death on the other side of the finish line, Dawes blows himself up in Roadwork, and Ben Richards of the novel is a martyr (at best), not a revolutionary. Even the latter works that were published after Bachman’s true identity was exposed, Thinner and Blaze, end with their protagonists losing weight to death and being shot to death by the police, respectively. It does feel like The Running Man, in either prose or film form, shouldn’t really have a happy ending; it could have had a merely poignant one. Instead, this one ends in such a way that although it is a complete story in and of itself, it’s deliberately open-ended enough that it leaves the door open for a sequel that it should not have.
Politically, the film is kind of shallow. Ben Richards is a man with a short fuse, and his driving need is to provide for his family. He is a man with a motivation but without an ideology, and although he takes up arms against the system, one never buys that his personal vendetta against Killian transcends the personal into the revolutionary. We never learn what becomes of Ben’s wife and child in the novel, and that kind of ambiguity makes for a more interesting text, giving you something to mull over, while the film explicitly shows him reuniting with his wife after “winning” the game, after a fashion. There are the occasional very minor references to our contemporary real world and its problems. The only broadcast FreeVee that seems to exist consists entirely of game shows and a Kardashians spoof called The Americanos, which reflects a lot of the current media landscape, and there’s one piece of graffiti that reads “A[ll] G[oons] A[re] B[ad],” but no one is going to go into this film and see themselves in any of the characters with negative traits. That’s not something that every film needs to have, but when one is making a satire, which this film purports (and occasionally manages) to be, if there’s nothing that challenges the viewer to recognize himself in the brain-rotted masses who cheer for the death of an innocent man because of manipulation tactics, then what are we doing here? When the film does hit, it does so in the way that the audience is manipulated. In one particularly noteworthy scene, the mouthpiece of a show that gives Richards a bonus for the death of a goon brings all of the children of the dead men on stage for a candlelight vigil. It’s good stuff, and it’s in these moments that the film manages to show a little of the edge that it’s reaching for but failing to grasp.
It sounds like I’m really down on this film, and that’s not really the case. I had a good time, and this was a well-paced action thriller with a likable leading man and some side characters who, if they can’t be fully fleshed-out, can at least be quirky. Glen Powell’s selling some tickets based on his towel-clad hostel escape alone, I can assure you. ‘Tis the season of heavy, heady prestige dramas like If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, After the Hunt, Die My Love, and still more in the days ahead, and sometimes it’s nice to have something that’s pretty to look at and decently constructed, even if it’s a little empty, just to break things up a little.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Swampflix 