Thanks to Baby Driver breaking people’s brains (and that Anthony Bourdain tweet didn’t help matters), Edgar Wright is now caught in a miserable catch-22. If he were to continue making the types of films he always has — deliciously self-critical and deeply personal tributes to genre cinema — he runs the risk of the work being misunderstood at best and uncharitably savaged at worst (see Last Night in Soho and the baffling vitriol that was hurled its way). If he makes a fourth Cornetto movie with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, he’s abandoned new frontiers for familiar comforts, and even then, these new films will never measure up to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, much like The World’s End didn’t for audiences when it served as that trilogy’s capstone. Perhaps his best option is the one he went with, directing The Running Man, an adaptation/remake of the Stephen King novel and Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, as a gun-for-hire (ignoring the fact that he previously did so on Scott Pilgrim). It works hard at bridging the gap between its two source works, bonding the plot beats and harder edge of the novel and the hyper-camp histrionics of the ’87 movie with Wright’s fun hyperkinetic editing and a great ensemble as the key ingredients of the superglue, but it’s already facing an uphill battle with other critics. The question is: Why?
One could suggest that Wright’s film hasn’t had the time to mature into a bong-and-brewski film-school frat house hit. As far as dystopian game show features go, Paul Michael Glaser’s hyperbolic goofiness has aged significantly better than its po-faced counterparts like Rollerball, but it wasn’t exactly cutting-edge when it was released: Robocop struck the vibe better, and the image-conscious alterations from King’s novel meant that the movie had to end with a kiss rather than a bang. Yet it was still prescient in diagnosing the change in tone that was to come. As we were years away from American Gladiators, Cops, and Survivor revolutionizing the “real-world exploitation as entertainment” genre, we lacked a good real-world analogue, aside from the game show, in whose aesthetic (including the casting of Richard Dawson as the emcee) Glaser found many of the film’s enduring delights. Wright’s variation, co-written with Michael Bacall, is able to preserve more of the King book by seizing upon the sausage-making of the average network reality show. It functions as a cinematic overview of the genre’s history as outlined in something like Emily Nussebaum’s Cue the Sun, going from hidden Candid Camera to Big Brother audience participation to the subtle mind-fuckery and brute-force manipulation allegedly applied to the average Bachelor contestant by the show’s producers.
What Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) offers Ben Richards (Glen Powell) isn’t a rose — it’s a wristband that doubles as an identity-scrubbing communicator and a kill-confirmation trophy — but the reasons he accepts are similar. He’s desperate. Ben once worked in construction, making a life for his family in the concrete brutalism of the Co-op City streets by doing white-knuckle work with little in the way of protection, but he was blacklisted after he told a union rep that his co-workers might be getting a little too much radiation from their time on the job. As such, he’s shit out of luck, his kid is sick, and his only hope is to go on some state-sponsored reality show to make some quick cash. Before he queues up, his wife (Jayme Lawson) tells him she’ll leave him if he goes on “The Running Man,” a show in which contestants are given thirty days to evade a group of assassins known as the Hunters. Of course, he winds up on the show, with his background and a belly full of fiery rage — central casting loves guys like this, and Killian makes him a good enough offer. If he signs on, he’ll give him a cash payment to buy his kid’s medicine on the spot, and, hey, if he survives the thirty days, he’ll be richer than he can comprehend. Even if he doesn’t, his family will get life-changing money for the days he does and for every cop and Hunter he kills along the way.
As it goes with most high-value prizes, the odds of him winning that money are astronomically low. The totalitarian corporate state behind all of these entertainments has surveillance technology straight out of a fascist wet-dream, including gravity-defying drone cameras and DNA scanners, and it has weaponized the audience as an additional asset. Report on a runner’s location, get a cash payout. They’ll find out about their contributions to the contestant’s capture on the omnipresent television screens, which can never be turned off, only switched to a static title screen. When they’re not watching a Kardashian-like reality program or one of the other violent entertainments, they tune in to see the show’s host, Bobby T (Colman Domingo), do two-minute hates. With the production team’s help, he is the main point man for their presentation as hardened criminals, with the producers deep-faking segments of the tapes the runners are required to send in each day. That’s not to say that there aren’t folks willing to help a guy like Ben out —an old pal (William H. Macy) outfits him with disguises and fake IDs, a family in Boston gives him aid after a fiery confrontation with the hunters, and a nerdy outcast (a fantastic Michael Cera) with a vendetta against the cops has a plan to get him to a bunker his dad made in the mountains a few hours away from Derry, Maine. But his chances aren’t great, and it’ll take all of his guile and patience to survive the month.
Powell is a bit of an odd casting choice, being a genial personality rather than a ticking time bomb of lower-class rage, but he makes sense when you see how well he handles the other aspects of Ben’s character. He’s as witty as he was in Hit Man, willing to embarrass himself for the sake of a gag (such as his rooftop flight when the Hunters catch him as he’s about to hop into a flophouse shower), and he has a great way of translating on-the-page cleverness into practical action. With a little luck and help, he can MacGuyver an escape plan out of any sticky situation before the gang comes crashing in guns blazing. Were another actor in the role, I don’t think that’d come across as well, and this Ben Richards isn’t the out-and-out good guy that Arnold was, lacking the sense of righteous purpose. He doesn’t want to be doing any of it, and actively struggles with taking lives, even when it’s probably in his best interest to do so (say, when a Hunter is lying prone, practically waiting for the shot). On the other hand, Cera absolutely lives for violence when he shows up, and Wright delights in his unhinged, vengeful glee at his chance to settle scores. It’s the movie’s best and most dynamic sequence, full of cartoonish Cornetto humor, one-liners, and a healthy dose of absurdism. Like Benicio del Toro, between his work in a big-budget auteurist action thriller and Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, he’s having a hell of a year.
By no means is The Running Man the best work of Wright’s career, suffering from the fits and starts of the chase movie, but the problems with it mostly stem from the director trying to preserve King’s text. The addition of Cera’s manic slaughter is a welcome one, as are many of the attempts to add life to a standard-issue Bachman story. A vestigial detour involving a kidnapping in the final act becomes a hoary aside about haves-and-have-nots, and the conceit for the climax remains (mostly) the same, with all of its bummer disappointments. But Wright realizes that he’s also adapting the ’87 film — I can guarantee you that folks will remember Arnie, Dawson, and Jim Brown before they even think of the pseudonym that King published the novel under — and his ending attempts to accommodate that tone as well. I don’t think this is as much of an issue as others think, but I recognize that there’s a slight problem with it. Wright couldn’t control the environment in which his movie was released, and he couldn’t help the fact that the aesthetics of his totalitarianism are rooted in a different tradition than those in American cinema.
After the Russians gave them a good footing, the British perfected totalitarian, or dystopian, fiction. They spawned Orwell and Huxley, the pick-your-poison of “boot[s] on human face[s] forever” or chemically-induced conformity and the bliss it provides us with. Sure, we added media to the mixture with the contributions of writers like Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick, but they’re playing soccer, not football. Wright’s America comes from another British tradition, taking the tone and design of Co-Op City straight from the pages of 2000 AD or Zenith, where Judge Dredd dishes out justice to proles among the brutalist high-rises of Mega-City One or a dude in a Guy Fawkes mask decides to bring about a new Glorious Restoration via a terror bombing campaign. The England of V For Vendetta struck a resounding note when its adaptation hit cinemas in 2006 because the environment was right for it, and there was a sharpened edge that made its stabs at the tone of the W. years feel all the more cutting. Like Bong Joon Ho and Mickey 17, Wright’s work is being released into a very different world than the one in which it was made, where the apocalyptic style* in American politics has metastasized into something no less upsetting but more mundane than state-sanctioned murder on a reality show. Barbs are already being flung at Wright for making a Paramount Picture, even though he couldn’t have possibly predicted who would become its future owners.
Prescience is often a happy accident, one that Paul Thomas Anderson is reaping the benefits of. Had the election gone a different way, his lottery ticket might have been void, even if the policies he depicts and detests would have continued on as they were when he was writing his screenplay. Yet One Battle After Another was inarguably received as an accurate survey of the moment, capturing the zeitgeist as if it had been created mere hours before it arrived in cinemas. This is why I think Bong and Wright have struggled this year — they’re filmmakers viewing the current moment at a cultural distance, coming from places with histories of successful rebellions and practical change. Wright’s forefathers beheaded their kings, watched the colonial system collapse, and installed methods, such as snap elections, to change directions in a hurry, while Bong lived through the end of Korea’s Fifth Republic and the creation of a lasting democratic republic. Tales of Olympian titan-toppling are vastly more conceivable to them than they are to us now, as we struggle with the Sisyphean rhythms of American society, 250 years removed from our own successful revolution. The hill’s slope only seems to grow steeper, and stopping isn’t an option. What we can imagine is total, deserved failure (Eddington); capitulation to the cycles of violence that got us here in the first place (The Long Walk); or, to complete the Camus analogy, a life of never-ending struggle against a system that we will never be able to topple (OBAA), in which we can find solace in the small things we’re able to change.
I’m not trying to suggest that these movies should have ended differently (well, with the exception of Long Walk), but that our priors about formulaic conclusions should be reevaluated. Happy, revolutionary endings feel false to us, which is just one of many reasons as to why Glaser’s Running Man can’t hold up to something like Robocop, even at release, back when successful protest movements hadn’t totally been consigned to our national history books. It’s why Return of the Jedi isn’t satisfying, and why most conclusions of this sort fail — Fitzgerald’s observation that there are no second acts in American lives is, perhaps, why we like them so much in our storytelling. The end is when reality sets in, and “revolutionary” narratives end on ellipses. Yet Wright is all about transformational change in external and internal ways, and to bet that he’d preserve the acidity of King’s enemy was a bad beat. Maybe his observations about the coarsening of culture and the evolution of reality TV would have been better received in the ’00s*, but just because they’re late doesn’t mean that they’re not well-reasoned or applied or that The Running Man is less of a fun whiz-bang time at the movies. He’s still making his fables about the pitfalls of obsession and the ways one can use it to liberate themselves, unencumbered by the idea that he needs to “grow” as a filmmaker. We’ve met the change, and it is us.
* This is what we’ve always excelled at, and it’s our main contribution to the world of modern pseudo-nihilist speculative fiction. Zombies, cobalt bombs, comets over shopping malls, you name it. Consider it a legacy of our Puritan heritage, where survival and fire are our imagined fates, rather than state-enforced subservience. That is, after all, what “the city on a hill” really represented.
* If a straight adaptation had been released in, say, 2004, you bet your ass they would have changed that fucking ending then too.