How much and how Stephen King has shaped our Western imagination directly and indirectly, between literature and visual arts, is something we will perhaps never realize enough. “The Running Man”, which arrives in theaters on November 13, is yet another film adapted from one of the novels by the American writer, who published it in 1982 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

A film adaptation had already been made in 1987 starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose role here was instead taken by Glen Powell under the directorial direction of Edgar Wright. Which makes it a story more faithful to the original work (and therefore not a remake), a dystopian story in an America under an authoritarian regime where a man becomes entangled in a ruthless and dirty game of survival.

What The Running Man is about

In The Running Man there is a “necessary” event engine. The underlying matrix is ​​what in cinematographic jargon is defined as a “high concept”. That is to say, an immediately identifiable idea with a very simple basic motivation at its centre, but sufficiently drastic to be an adequate propulsion for the development of an often pyrotechnic and always moving entertainment plot.

Now imagine the story of a family man willing to do anything to find money for his sick daughter’s medicines and get his family out of poverty. It is the checkmate in which Ben Richards (Powell) finds himself, with a smoking nature and fired from all the miserable jobs that belong to the lowest social classes in a society divided into the castes of the rich and the poor.

Wright, who wrote the film with Michael Bacall (the two had worked together on that gem Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), then pushes the pedal of social anger, that feeling that resonates so well and so strongly in today’s community, and relaunches it in the polarized distances of the virtual, of social media, of the “Network”. Ben actually has a chance.

That of signing up for the reality show The Running Man, produced by a television network led by the god-producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) and which holds the state and the population in its grip, to which it administers an anesthetic made of entertainment and blood. In this reality show the contestants must survive for thirty days by hiding in the common world while being hunted by a team of “hunters”. If they win, they take home a billion dollars. But they never win.

The revenge of a defeated man

AND a perfect recipe: a story of abuse, endurance and catharsis. David against Goliath, where the house, in addition to being stronger, is even rigged. A story that then resonates with contemporaneity, because if before it was television, today it is the internet. Which, in fact, works even better these days. In fact, what has changed is a system that has spread from vertical surveillance to horizontal surveillance. “Record, report and report” suggest the advertisements and slogans of The Running Man, which want spectators to be active in the hunt and in that social network tamed as an instrument of control by the controller, essentially in an indirect police regime.

But the film doesn’t delve too deeply into theory. It is done and explodes in practice. With characters perhaps not memorable (Lee Pace, Michael Cera, Colman Domingo), but sufficiently characteristic to make them valid supports for a story that opens and expands progressively. From an escape into the metropolitan corridors (where the film with Schwarzenegger was confined), The Running Man expands to cross the United States, from city to countryside, from urban to rural lands.

The strength of the film lies in Powell’s exasperated impetuosity, who among other things continues along that career path that leads him to disguise himself and change identities among homeless people, managers and blind priests, after having already “hidden” in the recent Chad Powers series and above all in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, in which the actor histrionicly assumed multiple forms and personalities.

And Wright finally knows the action like the inside of his pockets. He does whatever he wants, from frenetic cat-and-mouse hunts in the narrow streets of dilapidated apartments to car chases in open spaces. Obtaining a result that perhaps isn’t among the most brilliant of his career, but with an unexpected thematic cohesion and solidity of pace, points of convergence between the ruthless underlying reflection and entertainment varied in terms of scenario and solutions adopted.

Rating: 7

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