Written under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, Stephen King’s novel The Running Man was first published in 1982; it describes the malicious future of 2025.

King imagines that a massive authoritarian media conglomerate has a functional monopoly on all of American culture. To distract from its greed and incompetence, the quasi-governmental entity has replaced the country’s health care system, already strained by vast ecological devastation and income disparity, with a series of obscene game shows.

Corporations have successfully poisoned all natural resources. Basic necessities are unaffordable. Everyone is broken and everything sucks. If you are suffering, the TV (always turned on) reminds you that this is the fault of immigrants, of progressives, of gay people, of women—and actually it's your fault too.

In the fictional year of 2025, all of this injustice really pisses off protagonist Ben Richards. King’s counting on it to piss you off too.

In turn, King’s novel gets very, very angry at everything: the government, the media, the middle class, the dying environment, the world. Only an all-engulfing fire, cleansing the face of humanity, will exhaust such anger. The Running Man, the novel, was a pop culture call to rage unto oblivion.

Today, as we swerve into the homestretch of the actual 2025, that anger feels prescient—rejuvenating, even. Tearing society apart at its sinew, screaming into the face of every rich monster who’s made your life miserable, bathing in their pain: That’s that me espresso.

Unfortunately, English writer-director Edgar Wright doesn’t seem interested in exorcising that kind of blood-hot fury on screen. Instead, his The Running Man—the director's ninth feature and first under archetypal evil corporation-studio Paramount—is a playful to do of weightless CGI gore and an ultimately optimistic homage to '80s and '90s Verhoeven joints (especially RoboCop and Starship Troopers) distilled through Banksy-ish iconography and monster truck rally riffs. It is the kind of thing we may have called “high-octane” 20 years ago, back when Wright was making films that would have danced in the entrails of that absurd phrase, like the thrilling Michael Bay mash-up Hot Fuzz.

Now in 2025, watching an alternate vision of a 2025 that doesn’t seem all that alternative, our out-of-work protagonist and blue-collar hunk Ben Richards (Glen Powell) enters the Running Man contest, put on by the ever-present Network, to make enough money to get medical attention for his sick daughter and hopefully lift his family to a livable tax bracket.

The rules are simple, as explained by the extravagant host of the show Bobby Thompson (Colman Domingo). Richards has 30 days to survive a worldwide game, chased by Hunters: an elite squad of murdering mercenaries (redundant?) led by the Baron Zemo-masked Evan McCone (Lee Pace), who does his damndest to act through his beautiful eyes.

Though bystanders can’t participate in the hunt, the Network does pay out cash rewards for reporting a Richards sighting, effectively turning the public against their contestant. They aren’t against employing deepfakes and AI concoctions either, manipulating a desperate viewership by portraying Richards as a cop-killing maniac. Violence is bad unless used by the state.; then violence is unequivocally good.

If this sounds familiar, keep moving. The longer Richards survives, traveling throughout the northeastern seaboard of the US, the more he witnesses the ways living in 2025 just absolutely sucks for most people. He finds in himself an ember of political conscience, pushed by the noble teenage Bradley (Daniel Ezra) and the deadpan psycho Elton (Michael Cera) to be the guy who lights a revolutionary flame.

Richards handsomely evades capture, barely scraping by one close-call after another. For the first hour or so of this 133-minute action movie, Powell is as blandly magnetic as a man who looks like that can be, doing a mild Tom Cruise impression while taunting the audience and hollering into a camera lens during his daily, requisite missives. Well-sculpted actor-men love to yell down the barrel of an expensive camera.

The whole character’s a feint. As Wright scrambles to establish an emotional throughline to the carnage, Powell’s anger is missing from the film. He's more than miscast; he’s completely unbelievable as an antihero rancid with hate and willing to burn down the world. A man who looks like that does not have insides rotted by loathing.

Like Powell’s running form, action set pieces pass perfunctorily. What you’ve seen in the trailers is what you’ll get. Cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon—who worked with Wright on 2021’s Last Night in Soho—mostly ignores the smokey neon grime of Paul Michael Glazer’s 1987 loose adaptation. Wright only occasionally nods to his predecessor, including one winking Arnold Schwarzenegger allusion.

Similarly perfunctory is Josh Brolin’s performance as Running Man showrunner Dan Killian, a straight-down-the-middle compromise between Richard Dawson’s sleazy depiction in the 1987 film and Brolin’s well-oiled, real-life talkshow persona. Not exactly inspiring villainy coming from the A-lister.

Much of the movie feels like a missed opportunity, Wright relying on his signature whip-pans and visual puns rather than engaging in the story’s barrage of relevant and relevantly maddening themes. The inhumanity of reality TV, the prison of poverty, the fascism of capitalism, and the factory of death that is our species—check a box next to anything that gets your teeth grinding. Spoiler: The Ben Richards of Edgar Wright’s The Running Man does not burn down the world.

The Ben Richards in King’s The Running Man does. Or, at least, he's willing to. As much as he wants to hew closely to King’s novel, Wright is unwilling to take it all the way. And here, in our own dystopian 2025, that’s just bad TV.

The Running Man opens in wide release on Fri Nov 14, 133 minutes, rated R.