The Running Man: a crowd-pleasing thrill ride powered by the star-wattage of Glen Powell

In the world of Edgar Wright’s confident adaptation of Stephen King’s 1982 dystopian sci-fi novel The Running Man, inequality is rampant, healthcare is unaffordable, and the population is narcotised by luridly violent game shows and reality TV about celebrity families. One has to admire King’s uncanny prescience here – except that corporate capture of the US government is even more blatant than in reality, it all sounds astonishingly familiar. Wright’s film is firmly not a rerun of the campy, quippy gladiatorial arena games of Paul Michael Glaser’s 1987 version (though, in a nice touch, that film’s star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has his face on this film’s ‘New Dollars’). Instead, the TV show at its heart involves the huge deadly public hunt of King’s novel, its competitors at the mercy of every passer-by.

When his sick toddler needs expensive medicine, unemployed Slum Side dweller Ben Richards (a fast and furious Glen Powell) is pushed by TV gameshow producer Dan Killian (a pleasingly devilish Josh Brolin) to sign up for The Running Man – a gameshow in which a group of contestants goes on the run pursued by murderous hitmen, the ‘Hunters’, with the promise of a $1 billion payout for anybody who can survive 30 days. As Ben hares through grim slums and stinking sewers and battles against the Hunters, his fraught cross-country hide-and-seek encounters make the film’s expansive world feel darkly funny as well as perilous. Alongside this, tension is cranked up by the public’s own eager and inept attempts to “Hunt Him Down!”

While cleaving smartly to King’s novel, the film is also an unabashed and extended homage to Paul Verhoeven’s satire-studded sci-fi action films – to Robocop (1987) and, more pertinently Total Recall (1990), which it resembles right down to its authoritarian overlords, oppressed proles, cartoon violence and retro-future production design, in which the steel-and-glass buildings of the Haves are walled off from the Have-Nots’ shanty towns. If the script’s playful parodies (it was co-written by Wright and Michael Bacall, who also co-wrote Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, 2010) don’t always have Verhoeven’s deadpan punch, the glossy, bread-and-circuses mania of the TV show is a gleeful success. It is a high-energy mix of entertainment and shameless propaganda for the country’s all-powerful Corporation, with the baying audience whipped up by Colman Domingo’s ebullient host, who traduces Ben as an angry menace to society – though anger is his own stock in trade: “Bloodlust is our birthright! Set it free!”

Using the kind of kinetic visual storytelling that made Baby Driver (2017) scorch along, Wright keeps the pace of the film’s first two-thirds agreeably speedy, sending the wily Ben bolting through risky New York hotel hideouts and an explosive escape from a Hunter crew in a Boston flophouse. However, Ben’s lone trajectory ensures that the supporting cast remain colourful but one-note characters. Ben’s fellow Runners are swiftly despatched in comic killings: the cocky Laughlin (Katy O’Brian) becomes flame-thrower fodder for a pair of bounty-hunting children. Even underground video-activist Bradley (Daniel Ezra), who reveals the rigged heart of the show and spells out the Corporation’s widespread evil-doing, is one more fleeting, amusing but functional encounter.

Nonetheless, Glen Powell’s sheer star-wattage powers Ben satisfyingly through his quest, portraying him as an everyman action hero in the John McClane mould (there’s more than a hint of Die Hard, 1988, in his dogged struggle). Powell’s rugged but amiable screen presence allows Ben’s short-fused video rants, mailed in daily to air on the show, to read as furious resistance rather than showboating anger. Always alert to a moment of knowing fan-service, the film also incorporates an entire sequence of eminently memeable shots of ‘Powell in a towel’. This culminates in him abseiling bare-arsed from a hotel roof, showing off (among other things) Wright’s deft comic touch. Lovers of the trademark visual gags in the Cornetto Trilogy may feel short-changed, however, even if Michael Cera’s role as a resourceful anarchist unleashing a stream of Home Alone-style booby-traps on the Hunters also hits that sweet spot. Instead, there’s a surprisingly topical strand of social commentary, as Ben rages about healthcare, radioactive pollution and the Corporation’s divide-and-rule propaganda, urging the public, Network-style, to switch off their TVs.

Between the skilful action sequences, the winking gags and the ever-looming threat of Lee Pace’s masked master-hunter Chief McCone (whose gun and knife are inscribed ‘Fate’ and Destiny’), it’s a highly enjoyable thrill-ride for a good stretch of time. Fidelity to King’s original narrative creates a major problem, though, in a crammed and over-complicated last act which reworks the novel’s difficult ending into an unhelpfully convoluted finale. But before it stumbles, The Running Man conveys some valuable home truths about our own society’s current alienation and precarity, artfully wrapped within crowd-pleasing, high-octane fun.

► The Running Man is in UK cinemas now.