Movie Review: "The Running Man"

My nightmare

If any of you guys are fans of Stephen King, you've probably read his short story "The Running Man", published under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. The story is set in a dystopian future, where a man is forced by circumstance to participate in a deadly game show for the entertainment of his fellow citizens, wherein he's given a certain amount of time to roam the country and attempt to avoid being caught. If he succeeds, he wins a billion dollars...if he fails, he's killed on the spot or captured and executed. Being as these is a story by Stephen King, there isn't quite a happy ending, but there is a measure of satisfying yet bitter revenge.

Well, someone back in the late 80's thought it would be a good idea to cast Arnold Schwarzanegger in a movie that shares the story's title and basic premise, but not a whole lot else. In fact, "The Running Man" movie pretty much takes whatever's good about the story and eliminates that, and replaces it with lowbrow action. But that didn't stop me from wasting two hours of my morning, and so I sat down to watch the movie in full, and now I share my thoughts with you.

As I said the movie does have a few things in common with the short story. For one, the movie is set in a dystopian future. Or, perhaps I should say it's set in a dystopian alternative 80's (one might argue that the 80's were already dystopian in their own right, but imagine an alternative 80's that's even more screwed up.) You know how you watch movies set in the future that are made during certain decades and you think "Oh hah, that's what people in the 70's think people 100 years from now will be like" and it's basically people in slightly different bell-bottoms with bigger and wavier haircuts? Well, it would be a stretch to say that "The Running Man" is even set in the future, the movie is so dominated by 80's chic. For one, there's the awful electronic drum machine piece that opens the game show in the movie, accompanied by awfully clad unitard dancers in clunky heels with big fritzy hair doing dances that MC Hammer might have choreographed. Second, there's the manly cut dresses with big shoulder pads on the women, each of whom is wearing giant geometrically shaped earrings. Then there's the extremely cheesy guitar-inspired soaring love song that runs during the credits...think Kenny Loggins "Meet Me Halfway" but worse, and you'll know where I'm coming from.

The movie also changes how the game works. In the short story, the running man is literally set loose upon society, with little to no restriction on his movement, though an entire nation knows his face and is looking for him, along with the authorities and "hunters" for the show who chase him down. Well, I guess filming the entire country would be a little expensive, so the movie confines the game to an earthquake destroyed zone in Los Angeles, though really it's just a series of poorly put together movie sets. But hey, a budget is a budget. The really big change has to do with the hunters, who in the movie are transformed into "stalkers" (does that sound worse, or better?) who are crazily costumed and designed more along the lines of pro-wrestlers. See "Professor" Toru Tanaka above, better known as "Sub Zero", who looks like a sumo wrestler,goes out armored as the least mobile of all hockey players on the ice, and decapitates his enemies with a razor sharp hockey stick. Then there's this lovely fellow:



This is "dynamo", a big chubby white guy clad in lite-brite armor who enjoys zapping his enemies with his lightening gun while singing opera. Can you imagine how he meets his end?
If you think it has something to do with the error of judgment of wearing electrified armor in a building with sprinklers, you might be onto something.

Then there's "Buzzsaw" (guess what his weapon is) and Fireball (guess what his weapon is and guess how both die) and lastly, Richard Dawson of Family Feud fame who's the game show host and central villain, who actually comes off pretty well as a villain probably due in no small part to what decades of Family Feud did to his mind.

Of course no action movie can end with the death of the hero immolating himself to gain revenge on his enemy, so our hero Arnie saves the day with the help of resistence fighters who look like they wandered off the set of "The Warriors" (also a movie I'm going to review at some point), threw on some camo and got down to business. Though the movie ends with them capturing the game show stage, I suppose they went on to the bigger and messier business of liberating dystopic alternative 80's America from bad TV in general, or perhaps Richard Dawson was really the emporer of America and the whole system collapsed like a stack of cards upon his death. By the end, you really don't care, and I found myself wishing that they'd stick Arnie in the death zone again only this time actually kill him so he'll stop saying things like "I'll be back" and "Need a light?" when he sets Fireball on fire.

So that in a nutshell is "The Running Man." I'd say I was disappointed, but that would imply that I was expecting something of it. Let's just say it was better then spending two hours watching reruns of "Charmed", and that's saying something.