The Running Man (2025) Review: Spectacle Without a Soul

Edgar Wright is a smart, stylish director. Glen Powell is a likable, naturally charismatic actor. You’ll have to remind yourself of both while watching The Running Man — a flashy but empty remake that trades substance for mood and heart for grit, only to come up short on both.

To be fair, Wright didn’t set out to remake the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger cult classic. That version, which bore little resemblance to the 1982 Stephen King novel (writing under his pseudonym Richard Bachman) it was based on, leaned hard into sci-fi spectacle and camp. Wright’s take, co-written with Michael Bacall, aims to be more faithful to King’s original story — a grim, survivalist thriller where the only goal is to stay alive. Theoretically, that’s an interesting pivot. In execution? It’s mostly just a slog.

Even updated for modern audiences and returned to its original structure, the setup still slaps: In a dystopian near-future, America’s top-rated reality show is The Running Man, where “runners” are hunted by a rotating squad of assassins for thirty days. Survive the month, win a billion dollars. Powell (playing far against type) is Ben Richards, a working-class dad who joins the show to pay for his daughter’s medical care. As his scrappy survival skills unexpectedly turn him into a public sensation, the show’s producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin, having a bit more fun here with capped teeth and smooth threats than he did in Weapons) decides it’s time to put Richards down before he becomes a symbol.

This should be fun. But the film never quite knows what tone it’s chasing — or what it wants us to feel about any of it.

Powell, so breezily appealing in Top Gun: Maverick and Twisters, is clearly trying to stretch here. You can see him trying to shed the charm and tap into something darker. But it never clicks. His performance feels clenched — like he’s wearing someone else’s skin. There’s one standout towel fight sequence that reminds you he’s a capable physical actor, but beyond that, the film gives him little emotional ground to stand on. His Ben Richards has no real arc. He’s reactive, not revolutionary.

The bigger problem is how many characters just… evaporate. Emilia Jones (Winner)  is second billed and doesn’t show up until the 80-minute mark. When she does, she and Powell jump from strangers to yelling at each other about class in two scenes flat, and it feels like five conversations are missing. Michael Cera (Barbie), on the other hand, makes the most of his screentime as a nervy rebel with a surprisingly coherent backstory — which is more than can be said for most of the cast.

The Batman‘s Jayme Lawson (as Ben’s wife) brings warmth to her brief scenes but gets benched early. Colman Domingo (Rustin), Karl Glusman (The Neon Demon), and Lee Pace (Bodies Bodies Bodies) are barely sketched. William H. Macy (Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes) pops in and out like a character from a different movie entirely. It’s all chopped up, as if entire subplots were lost in the edit.

Even the hunters, supposedly the show’s crown jewels, are bland. In the ‘87 version, they were cartoonishly fun — each with a gimmick, a look, a vibe. Here, they’re mostly armed, growling men in military gear. Pace does what he can, but there’s not much to chew on. Same goes for the production design. Wright’s longtime collaborator Chung-hoon Chung (The Last Night in Soho) delivers crisp, competent images, but the visual language feels weirdly flat. There’s no sense of scale or danger or style — not the kind we’ve come to expect from Wright.

There are glimmers of the movie this could’ve been. A satirical beat here, a bit of absurdism there, moments when you can tell Wright wanted to say something about the monetization of pain, or the dehumanizing effect of spectacle. But then it backs off. Instead of building to any kind of catharsis or rebellion, the movie just circles its premise until the energy leaks out. You keep waiting for a theme to land — something to make it matter — but the film shrugs it off in favor of another action beat.

Maybe that’s what frustrates me most. I actually like The Running Man as a concept. The original movie, for all its cheese and awkward pacing, had a sense of fun and a message — it knew what it was mocking. This version feels too self-serious to entertain and too shallow to provoke. Everyone involved is better than this, which only makes it harder to watch them stumble through something that never finds its footing.

By the end, The Running Man (2025) doesn’t illuminate the book, elevate the franchise, or add anything urgent to the genre. It just exists. And for a story built on the thrill of the chase, that kind of inertia is deadly.