Review #371: The Running Man (2025)

End-of-Year Bonus Review - The Running Man (2025)

[This movie is fairly new, so as of the end of 2025, it does not appear to be streaming for free anywhere, but is available for purchase or rental on many platforms.]

So, obviously this movie isn't horror, but hey, it's my blog and I really wanted to talk about this one. So here we are, to cap out the year!

I'm a big fan of the original film adaptation of The Running Man, even though I know it doesn't stick very close to Stephen King's novel at all. It's a cheesy, campy action movie featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime. But when the trailer for this one dropped, it immediately hooked me- it looked fun, it looked brutal, and it looked action-packed. (Also, it's written and directed by Edgar Wright- who made two of my favorite movies of all time, The World's End and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World!) But I started to get worried once it released because I was seeing a lot of mixed reviews. So I went in with my expectations as tempered as I could.

Long story short: this movie is a BANGER. I don't know where in my top movies it belongs but it's definitely up there. Spoilers for the end of the review: 10/10. I love this film.

The story takes place in a dystopian future where the media controls everything and people have to put their health and safety on the line just to make ends meet. (Thank goodness that all takes place in the far-off future of... 2025!?) Anyway, it follows Ben Richards, an unemployed father with a sick daughter who desperately needs to provide for his family, so he ends up getting roped into taking part in The Running Man, a wildly popular game show where contestants ("runners") are loosed out into the world to run, hide, and survive for thirty days while a group of elite forces ("hunters") track down and kill them, and the general populace is rewarded for aiding in their capture. The longer a runner survives the more money their family gets, and if they can go a full thirty days, they'll be home free with enough money to put them in the top 1% of the entire world- but nobody's ever managed to survive. Can Ben Richards do what nobody else has? Watch the movie and find out.

I don't want to give away any plot points, but I will say if you've seen the Schwarzenegger movie the two are so different as to be entirely distinct movies. (I've never read the book so I don't know exactly how accurate this one is, but I've heard it's pretty accurate.) But I thought this movie was fantastic from the beginning until the end. The characters all feel like real people, the action is uniformly fantastic, and there are tons of exciting setpieces in here with great bits of heart and ingenuity every other positive descriptive noun you can think of. It's not 100% perfect (I'll get to a couple faults in a minute) but there was a sequence right near the beginning that completely blew my mind at how well the filmmakers understood what they were doing:

When Ben Richards signs up to take part in one of the game shows, they put him and all of the other contestants through a series of obstacle courses (running across precarious beams, climbing up a rock wall, he even catches a fellow contestant mid-air as they lose their grip)- all stereotypical fodder for this type of movie. But during this sequence, they intercut each activity with footage of Ben doing those same activities- running across steel beams on a construction site laden with tools, scrambling up a ladder to escape a flood after blowing open a mine shaft, and catching a partner whose harness broke while dismantling an oil rig- all activities he would have done as part of the many jobs he's worked in his past, and all skills he's certainly going to need to survive the rest of the movie. 

I can't stress enough how good I think this sequence is- so many other movies, ALL other movies practically, just expect you to assume and accept that the everyman protagonist just happens to have all of these skills in their back pocket, including the Schwarzenegger adaptation (which doesn't even try for a second to explain why this "ordinary, all-American guy Ben Richards" is played by a giant Austrian bodybuilder). But this movie, in literally fifteen seconds of screentime, manages to perfectly and seamlessly justify it. This is the kind of thing that truly shows how Edgar Wright knows how to make a damn movie.

Now, I will throw out just a couple tiny nitpicks: the first is that the characters in the movie all seem to really stress the idea that Ben needs to keep on the run, keep moving, lest the hunters find him. Like, early on, a family takes him in and gives him shelter, but even they immediately set up arrangements for him to get out of the city- but if they're sympathetic to his cause, why not just hide him in their apartment for the full thirty days? It's a big city, and the hunters are surely going to assume he kept moving, right? While watching I assumed that there would be ways of tracking him- he has an electronic bracelet that reminds him of details of the game, so maybe they could track that, and also, he has to send out a 10-minute video of himself every day, so then I assumed the videos would be time- and location-stamped so that would also incentivize him to keep moving. But then, later on, someone else sympathetic to his cause suggests he pre-record the rest of his videos and hide out in a bunker, so clearly that isn't the case! So I dunno, it really seems like the best option would be to find someone who isn't going to rat you out, and just hide in their crawlspace for 30 days. Bing bang boom, you're one of the richest people in the world and you can pay them half or something.

Another thing that I wasn't crazy about is the ending; it's not exactly bad, it's just a bit more ambiguous than I would have liked and went in some weird directions. If I can give a vague spoiler from the Schwarzenegger movie, that story's resolution involves Ben recording the CEO of the evil corporation saying some incriminating stuff and releasing it to the public, so when this movie gives the protagonist a device with which to record things, I thought surely that would come into play here as well. It doesn't. It's not a dealbreaker, and again it's not bad, I just felt the ending was the weakest part of an otherwise solid film.

Oh! And one more little thing, this too ends up not really being a huge deal but it's worth mentioning: this movie has a character (the lead hunter) who is wearing a mask for basically the whole movie. And there's a scene where Ben demands to see his face. This is one of those weird moments so many movies have and it's usually because we the viewer know the masked person is going to be someone recognizable, maybe someone related to the main character or someone we've seen previously in the film. In this case, you do eventually see his face, and guess what? It's not anybody we've seen, nor is it anybody Ben has seen. (I don't consider that a spoiler, because as he was about to take his mask off I wracked my brain to think, "Wait, was there even anyone in this film that this could possibly be?" and no, nobody came to mind. The unmasked character does end up being someone who is significant to the world and plot, but as far as I know his face was never shown before this point so it seems very odd to me to build up to this moment where he gets unmasked. They either should have shown his face earlier in the film (out-of-context, so viewers don't know that's who the masked guy is, just so the face looks familiar later on) or they should have had Ben recognize who he was once his mask was off. (Or even have him say something like "Hey, you look familiar" and then later on have it occur to him why this man looks familiar.) It just seems like a weird missed opportunity, or perhaps something that got left on the cutting room floor.

But anyway, I seriously think this movie is fantastic. Possibly the best film I saw all year. I really hope all of you give this one a chance; if you do, let me know what you thought!

Overall Rating: 10/10 Colored Jumpsuits

Easter Eggs: This movie is CHOCK FULL of Stephen King easter eggs. Here's a few: 

Derry, Maine (the fictional setting for It) is mentioned several times

One of the previous runners is named Charles Decker (a name shared by the protagonist of another of King's novels, Rage)

When the contestants all go to their shared dressing room, each jumpsuit has the last name of an actor who has appeared in another King adaptation (Nicholson, Bates, Walken, Duvall, etc.)