Movie review Running Man

The release of Edgar Wright’s new movie, scheduled in Italy for November 13, 2025, is already achieving great success worldwide, capturing the attention of critics and audiences alike thanks to its relentless action and its ability to tell a dystopian story with a modern approach.

From ’80s action to social dystopia  

The comparison with the 1987 movie is inevitable but also necessary to understand the scope of this new version.  

Glaser’s Running Man was a futuristic, over-the-top action movie, steeped in satire but filtered through the colorful, muscular aesthetics of that era. The deadly reality show was a pretext to watch Schwarzenegger face eccentric gladiators, each more absurd than the last, in a parade of violence and spectacle that today seems both naive and irresistible.

In the ’80s movie, contestants were arrested on false charges and forced to participate in the deadly TV game, facing eccentric gladiators like Dynamo and other trained killers. In the remake, participation is voluntary but equally desperate: those who run risk their lives, and anyone can report or kill the fugitives, making the game much more realistic and brutal.

Stephen King’s novel, on the other hand, was something entirely different: a desperate race through a decaying America, told as a social nightmare rather than a televised arena. There, the protagonist did not fight monsters disguised as showmen but the very machinery of society—hunger, misery, dehumanization. This is why Wright has repeatedly emphasized that his movie is not a remake but a new adaptation of the book.

Cast  

Glen Powell, coming off a highly successful season with Top Gun: Maverick, Anyone But You, and the surprising Hit Man, where he demonstrated a versatility across comedy, drama, and action that has made him one of the most versatile actors of his generation.

This time, the protagonist, Ben Richards, played by Glen Powell, is an ordinary man forced to enter the game out of extreme necessity: poverty and the need to buy medicine for his sick daughter. He is not the muscular, cocky superman portrayed by Schwarzenegger but an everyman pushed to the limit, a character closer to the desperate antihero of King’s novel.