'The Running Man' (1987) is Remake-Worthy

The Revolution Will Be Televised (and Full of Spandex)

Stephen King released The Running Man in 1982 under his pseudonym Richard Bachman as a scathing critique of the rapacious hyper-consumerism of the 1980s. Five years later, director Paul Michael Glaser (best known as the Starsky in Starsky & Hutch) and Die Hard writer Steven E. DeSouza would tackle an adaptation. The result is a loose adaptation that falls prey to many of the cultural elements the novel critiqued while still offering up some original insights of its own.

Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Ben Richards, a police captain who refuses to fire on innocent civilians and gets imprisoned as a result. After a failed breakout, the producers of the popular game show The Running Man choose him as their next contestant. On this show, prisoners are offered freedom in exchange for facing off against a bevy of souped-up assassins called hunters with names like Subzero and Buzzsaw in a live televised arena for one night.

From the start, the film differs greatly from the source material. The latter’s Ben Richards is a poor husband and father with a sick daughter. He elects to be a contestant in The Running Man because of the promise of financial riches if he wins. The show also takes place on a global scale for thirty days and follows Richards on the run. If he survives, $1 billion is his. The dynamic in the film is fundamentally different.

DeSouza uses this narrative change to comment on media manipulation and mob mentality. Richards is completely innocent and even heroic, but all of his actions are re-edited to villainize him to the public. The game show begins (after an extended aerobic exercise montage) with a reel of Richards’ purported crimes. He becomes a scapegoat for the largely unexplained authoritarian regime that controls America somewhere between 2017 and 2019. While the script gets a lot of mileage out of this theme, it does lessen the novel’s commentary a bit.

In the novel and seemingly in the upcoming film, the game show is popular not because the public wants justice against so-called criminals, but because they genuinely have a disregard for human life. They know Ben is innocent and still want to see him dead. With social media today having no issue laughing at the misfortune or even death of others, this is totally believable.

The world of the film is often comedically dark, where innocent people are either framed or outright murdered and the most popular show on television is where people get hunted for sport. Dystopia gags abound: “Mr. Richards, I’m your court-appointed theatrical agent”. Yet at the same time, it has a deep optimism about the ability for people to “wake up” and revolt. Ben eventually starts to turn the public in his favor by dominating his hunters and revealing the regime’s duplicity. This seems to only require Ben to simply be a bigger man physically than everyone else and say a lot of cringey one-liners.

Schwarzenegger is at the start of his prime here. This came out after Conan the Barbarian and the first Terminator film. Predator released the same year. Sadly, he is just not a great actor yet. His biggest talent is his muscles. Every line read is pained and awkward. He is funny both intentionally and not. This version of Ben Richards does not feel like a real person who inhabits this world. He instead comes off as an over-the-top character created for a show in the sickly, repressed America depicted. Luckily, the rest of the cast almost makes up for it.

One of the film’s most inspired moves was to cast the original host of Family Feud Richard Dawson as the host and producer of The Running Man. He is fantastic here and lends the whole affair a bit more authenticity.

The show’s “hunters” do what they need to do, too. They are all suitably goofy and recall professional wrestlers. As I said before, it does feel like the film indulges in some of what it criticizes. Professional wrestling is clearly both a target and an inspiration. The film’s other Predator cast member and later governor Jesse Ventura does steal the show as hunter Captain Freedom in a role that channels the later talents of Patrick Warburton and fellow WWE alumni John Cena.

Richards is aided in his competition by his prison allies Laughlin (Yaphet Kotto) and Weiss (Marvin J. McIntyre). Kotto is great in everything from Alien to the criminally underrated Blue Collar (1978), but neither him or McIntyre get much to chew on. In one of the film’s more baffling decisions, Richards is also helped by Mic, the leader of a government resistance group, who is played by Mick Fleetwood (of Fleetwood Mac) in heavy elderly man prosthetics. I have no idea what the point of that was.

Maria Conchita Alonso plays the totally necessary love interest Amber Mendez who is there to look pretty and in danger. She is also totally necessary for the film’s ludicrously cheesy ending.

The 1987 Running Man has quite a few problems and is not a great take on the book. Yet, there is a lot of fun watching Arnie beat up an opera-singing electricity-wielding fat guy (Erland van Lidth) or crack such jokes as “here is Subzero...now plain zero!” Turn your brain off and enjoy the bonkers action. Or maybe turn it on just for the handful of occasions where there is some interesting societal commentary.

The upcoming adaptation from director Edgar Wright is set to be a more faithful adaptation. Ben Richards (Glen Powell) will be a father who volunteers for the show to care for his sick daughter. The game will be held throughout the real world rather than in an arena. And in the age of TikTok brainrot and sports betting, the possibilities for a new adaptation are various. While the 1987 film is fun, it is certainly not above improvement.