(courtesy IMP Awards)
Way back in 1982, the idea that the world could be as dystopian as it is depicted in The Running Man would have seemed more than a little far-fetched.
It’s not that the movie, based on Stephen King’s work of the same name which came out that year, did strike some familiar notes – the world was already all too familiar with authoritarian regimes and their propensity for raising certain select groups up while damning others to the slough beneath their feet.
Books like George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World had already taken the lessons of history, and they were distressingly plentiful through much of the twentieth century, and prophesied the degree to which they could be taken with advances in technology in particular.
But even so, when this reviewer was a young man, those types of regimes, armed to the teeth with the ability to technologically surveil their citizens to within an inch of their life and to condition behaviour and attitudes seemed the stuff of alarming, sagely cautionary fiction and nothing more.
Then, of course, came everything from mobile phones to the internet to social media platforms and suddenly the idea that society could be controlled and conditioned to the point where a modern take on Roman Colosseum-esque barbarism was not just possible but roundly welcomed by many people proved that the stuff of prophetic warning was more than capable of becoming modern day dystopian fact.
So, while The Running Man certainly seemed eerily possible over four decades ago, in the day of ever more brutal reality TV, where the normal norms of human interaction are suspended in favour of ever more terrible behaviour – if you’re paying attention, many of these shows start off quite benign like Survivor and gradually become more bestial and voyeuristically nasty as time goes on – now it seems not that far removed from what we are experiencing now.
Granted, we are not watching shows like The Running Man, in which three contestants must stay alive for 30 days to pocket one billion new dollars, a fortune in a society where even medicine for the flu is beyond the reach of many working people, their exits not a simply ordering out of the studio by a baying audience but actual violent bloody execution live during telecast.
They are pursued by government “hunters”, essentially military goons, who have the power to summarily execute their televised quarry in the most telegenic way possible, and also by members of the public who can get a sizeable reward for taking out people who are demonised to such an extent that no one is aware that they have been taken in by propaganda dressed up in highly entertaining clothes (that’s if you think ritualised televised murder is fun to watch which, thankfully, not everyone agrees with).
It’s barbaric as hell and a certain death sentence for anyone who signs up for the show, but Ben Richards (Glen Powell, who bares all simply to escape from the goons out to kill him) has no choice with his daughter Cathy (Alyssa and Sienna Benn) sick with the flu and his wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) unable to earn enough to make up for the loss of her husband’s wage after he is sacked yet again for daring to stand up for those he manages.
Ben, who is angry but righteously angry so that’s okay, is a GOOD GUY, something that The Running Man, which does not know subtlety and which eschews, makes very clear over and over again, the aim to make Ben’s embrace of killing and maiming etc a different kind of barbarism altogether from that perpetrated by the bread and circuses regime which controls America (Canada, by way of contrast, is implied to still be somewhere you would want to flee to, which is heartening).
Catapulted into the game, which requires daily video checkins and which is hosted by Colman Domingo’s lecherously nasty but highly theatrical Bobby “Bobby T” Thompson with all the zeal of an executioner getting the crowd ready for the state-sanctioned murder to come, Ben has no choice but to do his best to stay under the radar and take help where he can get it, from kind souls like Bradley (Daniel Ezra) who fights the systems with guerilla telecasts of his own and vengeful nutters like Elton (Michael Cera) who is so intent to avenging his father’s death at the hands of the regime that he almost takes Ben down with him.
These characters, who are given a decent amount of screen time, and whose values stand in direct contrast to a regime intent on using the death of its citizens to hold onto power, suggest a film that wants to do more than simply offer up some thrilling chases and blockbuster escapism.
But The Running Man definitely diverts your attention, bread and circuses like from the climate change and fascism-afflicted world just outside the cinema doors, embodying some rather ’80s and ’90s blockbuster chutzpah, it doesn’t really do much with the rebellion it suggests Ben’s unexpected survival in the game it rapidly fomenting in an America where “RICHARDS LIVES” becomes a rallying cry for the downtrodden and the dispossessed.
Rebellion does bubble up, and it is, you might expect, telecast with forensic zeal and a with scathing critique of the moral bankruptcy of modern media well and truly on display, but it really doesn’t go anywhere near as far as you think it might.
Certainly Ben’s ability to stay alive and thus to stick it to the regime is a catalyst, a tipping point for a population wearing of social inequity to the point where they are happy, with some prodding, to take up arms, and it does add some political heft to the film’s clear condemnation of the barbaric entertainment so beloved of a dystopian regime which sees death as its ticket to a prolonged hold on power, but by and large while The Running Man is a lot of fun, rather ironically, to watch, it does add to much in the end, a blockbuster which says all the right things but which doesn’t do much with them, something that we lamentably see far too much of in the world in which we live.