Running Man (2025) - Movie Review - When Form Fails Content
In art, form and content are not separate considerations—they reinforce and help guide one another. Theme is easy, you just pick one and run with it—if you're a little more ambitious, you might even explore it—and it's the director's aesthetic, narrative, and even production choices that then either give that theme depth or make it ring false. A screenplay alone cannot do all the heavy lifting.
The prime example of production choices reinforcing theme is Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. Inseparable from its nightmarish production, Fitzcarraldo would not succeed as a piece without the background story of Herzog forcing Klaus Kinski and some Amazonian tribesmen to drag a boat through the rainforest. The film's exploration of obsession would fail to be as impactful if the director hadn't driven men involved in the production to death, illness, and despair to bring his vision to life; certain shots would never have happened, certain moments would have lacked their bizarre piano-wire-about-to-snap tension. Regardless of your opinion on whether that sort of thing is justified as part of art creation, the myth of Fitzcarraldo is a core part of what makes the film what it is. It is the gold standard for the theme of obsession in cinema specifically because the film itself was a product of a similar obsession to that of its protagonist. It is the ur example of how form and content are inextricably intertwined.
Obviously, though, not every film can be Fitzcarraldo. Really, all we can ask is that a film's form doesn't shoot its content in both kneecaps and push it down the stairs. Unfortunately, Edgar Wright's Running Man, bleeding from its knees and recovering from a recent fall, is unable to cross that very low bar.
Running Man (2025) is exactly that which it critiques: hollow entertainment with hypocritical moral messaging made by rich executives in order to keep the proles' troughs full of cynically hopeful 'you might escape capitalist samsara someday' propaganda.
Costing £110M and starring a cast of Hollywood luminaries, there's a strange disconnect when million dollar faces play-acting as the poor rail against the 'Execs' in one scene, then do 'wow Monster is so delicious!' product placement in the next—product placement so overt, I would almost think it was satirical, were they not real products paying the production company real money to be featured in the film as delicious/stylish avatars of dystopia.
Throughout the film 'KILL THE EXECS' graffiti adorns every wall, fascist-coded private cops mill about on every street corner, and seemingly every poor character under 50 is a budding anti-state revolutionary just waiting for their chance to bring down the corporate government. The problem is the people who made the film are the exact execs and media elite the film claims to be critiquing; they are the ones hiring private security forces to patrol their homes and offices, they are the ones fervently supporting the Global American Empire and everything it represents.
It's hard to take a film's critiques of inequality and the current media landscape seriously, when it's a mainstream Hollywood propaganda film about the plight of the poor, made on a hundred million dollar budget, by millionaires, starring millionaires, and expecting to make hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office in order to make everyone involved millions of dollars richer. All the while, my ticket to see this bombsite cost £11, which is twice as much as it would have cost had this film released in 2023 because the global economy is in a death spiral.
I believe that once upon a time Edgar Wright may truly have resonated with the Bachman Books—there are overt references to Rage and Road Work in this film—and I can imagine how, back in his low-paid Channel 4 days, dreaming about a film career he never expected to actually achieve, the working class anger of King's four original Bachman books was relatable and exhilarating.
But no man steps in the same river twice—because it's not the same river and he is not the same man. Edgar wright is no longer the young upstart filmmaker he was in the late 90s when he first dreamed of making this film. He is now a member of what George Carlin called The Big Club (and you ain't in it!) and he no longer has the ability to make the systemic critiques he might once have made as a younger, angrier, and less well-connected man. Ultimately, the part of him that would have made a great Running Man film was put up against the wall and shot in order for him to be in a position where he could even make a Running Man film in the first place—a Catch 22 of the modern film industry, but one which is built into the system by design.
While he might once have been a cult filmmaker making independent British films, Edgar Wright is now part of the machine. He's suited and booted and photographed on red carpets. Anna Kendrick is his ex-girlfriend; he considers Judd Apatow, Joss Whedon, and Quentin Tarantino close personal friends. It doesn't matter how much you want to cling to your identity as an outsider indie filmmaker, you only get to shut down streets in major cities to film action sequences if you are part of the machine.
And so, being part of the machine, Edgar Wright struggles to even play-act the revolutionary. Cops are bad... except the good cops. And even the bad cops are really just victims, being nothing more than pawns of the millionaires. And the millionaires, really, aren't they, in some ways, just victims too? Really the problem is the very small handful of rich and powerful executives who control the world. But not even all of them, because when the revolution happens some of them will have their 'come to Jesus' moment and join the riots. Honestly, when you think about it, the real problem is not systemic, it's just that one white guy in the skyscraper who's causing all the problems, and everyone else—including me and my millionaire friends—are just as much victims as you and everyone else on food stamps and welfare. Endless exceptions defang any critique the film might seek to make.
In a particularly egregious bit of sub-theming, the film also pushes the idea that good men will always have opportunities come to them if they're only willing to wait for them.
During one of the film's most disgusting and frustrating scenes, our protagonist is told that, had he visited his friend before signing up for the Running Man, he would have been given a profitable business that would have seen him set for life. The film stresses to the audience that everything works out for good men if they just wait; our protagonist's critical mistake was resorting to desperate measures to save his dying daughter, rather than continuing to suffer until opportunity landed in his lap.
As is repeated constantly throughout the film: do nothing and everything will work out.
As another example of this inaction doctrine, the film's one committed revolutionary is a comedy neckbeard with a Che Guevara poster and 'my dad was one of the good cops' backstory; this character is a joke, played by Michael Cera with a Super Soaker, and his attempts at system disruption shown to be futile—instead the audience is told 'the system obviously cannot hold, but please don't try to hasten the collapse, revolution will only come if you sit around and wait for it; inaction is ultimate praxis'.
The constant veneration of the poor as moral and dignified also needs to be noted. While this is an oft-critique trope in aesthetically leftist Hollywood movies, it is particularly egregious in this film—both in terms of how it's handled and in relation to the themes of the source material.
The presentation of the poor and destitute in Running Man (2025) is sickly sentimental and speaks to both a severe disconnect from the working classes and a strange morality where the working classes deserve better not because the conditions they live under are inherently cruel, but simply because they're better, smarter, more moral people than the rich.
Contrast this with Stephen King's source novel, which never made any pretenses of the lumpenprole being virtuous—in fact, as with many other works by authors who've been poor and wrote novels close enough to that state to accurately remember it, the destitute in King's book are vicious, spiteful, and selfish.
This is simply a reality of poverty; living as a indentured servant of a state that hates you and deliberately demoralises you to keep you under its thumb will make the intelligent bitter and the unintelligent feral. Acknowledging this reality does not justify the oppression of the poor—oppression is simply, by its nature, a bad thing, even if it is good men oppressing bad men. By contrast, taking the opposite perspective and pretending that poverty grants virtue is profoundly condescending. If poverty granted virtue, the rich would seek to achieve it, and the poor would not seek to escape it.
Ultimately, that which is not revelation is normalisation. Edgar Wright's Running Man is not raging against the system, it's Hollywood's most cynical attempt yet at coopting, commodifying, and neutering anti-system aesthetics and critiques. It is an abject failure as a work of art and has made Ellul rise from his grave just so he can do a victory lap—Baudrillard is merely spinning.
Running Man (2025), by simply being what it is, ends up being antithetical to everything Stephen King's seminal novel stood for—instead it's something much closer to its fictional Running Man TV show than anyone involved in the film's production will likely ever be willing to accept.
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