I’m surprised the online critics have panned the new version of The Running Man (2025). The movie is actually pretty darn good, if still not quite as good as the original 1987 larger-than-life movie starring the still larger-than-life Arnold Schwarzenegger. Here, the titular Ben Richards (Glen Powell) is a working-class Joe forced to apply for the Network's sadistic freeview game shows to save his sick baby girl.

By Emad Aysha
This is ‘closer’ to the Stephen King novel, and helmed by the British comedy/gore/action supremo Edgar Wright, while liberally tacking little snippets from the 1987 version. You’ll notice that Schwarzenegger’s face is on the new dollars everybody is desperate to get, with three contestants and uniforms modelled on the older flick.

LOOK WHO'S BACK: A screenshot from 'The Running Man' (2025) with Arnold as the governator of this British satire remake of an American satire, minus the one-liners.

Naturally, the world-building is more updated, with references to Obama along with aerial drones, mobile phone cameras, CCTV, DNA sniffers and neglected veterans. (There’s also a ridiculous soap called The Americanos, clearly lampooning Sex in the City.) And like the dystopian novel, the whole country is out to get you.

That being said, they change Ben Richards's character profile, and rightfully so. In the novel, he’s not a troublemaker and not terribly intelligent, whether well-read or street-smart. That’s a crinkle in King’s storyline because you can’t understand how it is that he would outsmart so many of the regular cops and professional hunters on his tail.

The Hunters are almost non-entities in the novel. Here, they’re smarter and also willing to blast away indiscriminately against citizens – the gas explosion scene – and kill their own kind.

Having somebody as physically built as Glen Powell makes sense; he looks like he takes steroids with his Coco Puffs. Not to mention the underworld contacts that give him a real head start, along with the various resistance figures who help him out. (Go-it-alone is a no-go philosophy.)

He’s also more honourable, refusing to let his wife do ‘degrading’ work; not a semi-pimp like in the King novel. Some of the most moving scenes in the movie involve Richards as a family man, with the missing sock of his little girl as a reminder of why he’s going through this.

The bit part actors are cool, especially Katy O’Brien from Final Reckoning, with touching themes about private-sector cops and the hot dog stand. The wife, Jayme Lawson, is the sexy Pearline from Sinners (2025).

The colours here are depressing, dystopian greys and purplely reds and blacks, meant to hint at Nazi colour-coding; the Hunters are clearly Black Shirts or Gestapo prototypes. The pacing is good too, with something always happening, whether in terms of emotion, intrigue, or action.

CHOMSKY'S NIGHTMARE: Glen Powell and Josh Brolin sharing an introspective moment about the 'manufacture of consent' in the era where social media and AI have made cable and satellite TV passé.

Even so, I still like the old movie a hell of a lot more. The smaller scale of the contest, with a play area instead of the whole populace, actually feels more expansive. They filmed this flick in the UK, with tight streets, council estates, and crowded semi-detached suburban houses on hills, so the world paradoxically feels smaller.

The cloud cover makes you think of rain and lush greenery, hardly dystopian, with Americans looking very out of place here – especially hick yokels and citizen militias. The high-res cameras they insist on using nowadays also make everything look too squeaky clean.

Glen Powell looks clean-shaven even when he isn’t, and insists on having a shower even when he’s on the run. (Who’d go out of his room to the local shower instead of trying to stay out of sight?)

The action is good, the stunts are good, but a bit too CGI-augmented to be fully believable compared to the gritty analogue heaven of the old movie.

The Stalkers are particularly worth mentioning in the Arnold feature because they closely mimic the larger-than-life world of American sports entertainment, specifically the then World Wrestling Federation.

They actually had Jesse ‘the Body’ Ventura as a retired Stalker, Captain Freedom, each one of them having his own speciality – Buzzsaw, Fireball, Subzero, etc. (My only qualm there is they didn’t give Jesse enough to do.)

You’re aware of Network politics because you have the original Damon Killian (Richard Dawson) under pressure because of the ratings. That’s why he makes the bad decision to pick Arnold.

The humour was both more surreal and subtle in the original, with references to Gilligan’s Island and the Justice Department’s entertainment division. The court-appointed theatrical agent scene is a classic like no other.

SUBLIMINAL FUTURE: Kurt Fuller in 'The Running Man' (1987) in the sleazy executive assistant role of a lifetime.

Richard Dawson was an actual game show host in his time as well as an actor, so he kills it in the movie. The new guy, very accomplished actor Josh Brolin, is too in control till he isn’t. He’s also too butch-looking, not somebody who’d fuss over hair and makeup and lie back in his chair, like in the old movie.

Everything about this movie is overdone without being over the top. The actors are competent and fit their roles, particularly Lee Pace as the suave but grizzled hunter Evan McCone.

But again, they look too clean-shaven, even when they’re fully bearded. Do country folk and inner city rebels use blow-dryers on their faces after a shower in this future world, while plucking loose hairs? And Stalker has very different connotations from the more generic Hunter, too, and the original bad guys look ‘unhinged’.

Another problem is that the world of today is too disturbingly close to what we see on display here, with violence against outsiders and suspicion against locals propping up the regime.

The race politics are also a bit too confusing. You can’t have rednecks badmouthing black people, and also have Richards with a black wife and Latinos out to get Richards like the rednecks.

In the novel, Richards was a racist, but when African Americans help him out and expose the network's lies to him, he realises who he was really fighting for. That character arc is absent here.

I did like the tit-for-tat between Richards and his woman hostage Amelia Williams (Emilia Jones). It does spoon-feed you information in a moralistic way, but her acting is sincere, if not heartbreaking.

She goes through a moral arc that drags us along with her, just like Amber Mendez (María Conchita Alonso) in the Arnold movie. The only difference is that this happens too late in the storyline.

The first movie was better conceived and more feel-good, with an awesome 1980s soundtrack to boot. The music here is bombastic but a bit too generic.

So, all in all, while definitely worth watching on the big screen, still watch the old movie first.

RUNOVER POLITICS: Sly Stallone as Machine Gun Joe Viterbo in the cult classic 'Death Race 2000' (1975), where you score points by killing the excess masses!

Then watch the even better Death Race 2000, with David Carradine in the United ‘Provinces’ of America, which is (sadly) even more ahead of the times!!