The Running Man

THE RUNNING MAN

Ah the 80's. I was born after that decade but I've heard people talk about the 80's like it's some sort of divine being that needs constant praise with a healthy dose of friendly ridicule to be appeased. I've heard of it's greatness, oh yes! It was a simpler time for everyone in the United States; all anybody had to worry about was The Scorpion's next album and utter nuclear holocaust from the Soviet Union. The 80's is famous for a few cultural trends that high school and college age girls today try their absolute hardest to duplicate. Honestly, have you ever been to a 80's themed party? It's horrible. All the girls go out and buy brightly colored leggings, miniskirts, and hand warmers. Meanwhile, all the guys go out and dress up like rockers and movie characters. In fact, my best friend once dressed up like Martin Castillo from "Miami Vice", fake mustache and everything.

  I may be mistaken but Uggs weren't quite a style at the time last I checked.

However, I shouldn't be talking too harshly since I dressed up like Bruce Springsteen with the leather jacket under the denim jacket on top of the jeans. I'm ashamed to admit that I even wore a red bandanna to complete it. 

But enough about all that. This evening I was scrolling through Netflix for a movie to review and I came across a particular film starring the wonderful "Governator" himself: Arnold Schwarzenegger. I've never been a giant fan of Arnie. I enjoy actors who try to play their parts as though they're actual human beings with their own individual hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, etc. But Arnie is an action movie hero and I suppose I just need to get used to it. As I saw that "The Running Man" was finally up on Netflix, I read the description just like everybody else looking for a movie to watch. I had heard this movie was pretty good from several sources and I had read Stephen King's novel the movie was based on. I enjoyed the book and the Netflix description made it seem like it would be like the classic science fiction novel with maybe a few minor changes, which is to be expected from any movie based off a book. I hit play on my remote and sat back to enjoy the drama and fight for survival like I fondly remembered reading. 

Holy crap. Holy crap. HOLY CRAP. There are very few movies that grab you by the throat and scream "LOOK AT ME! I'M A RELIC FROM THE 80's! SEE?!? I HAVE BRIGHT COLORS, ANNOYINGLY LOUD SYNTHESIZER MUSIC, AND A BITCHIN' TITLE SCREEN! LOVE ME!!!" "The Running Man" covers all the minimum requirements of a 80's action movie but goes above and beyond the call of duty. The 80's was a time when Hollywood was busy reinventing the action movie genre and I don't fault them for experimenting. Not at all, it's important to keep things fresh in movies or else things get stale. But somebody in the casting department should have realized that after "Rocky III" came out, having a cast that has even ONE professional wrestler already destroys the serious tone the movie might be trying to establish. This is especially true in 80's movies, given the cartoonish state of the World Wrestling Federation at the time. But when you add a bodybuilder to the pro wrestler/cinema equation it just gets plain silly. You would've thought that somebody pointed out to the director, Paul Michael Glaser, that having almost your entire cast consisting of none other than bodybuilders, pro wrestlers, and former 007 villains might be a fabulously terrible idea.

Oh don't worry, I fully intend to review this glorious masterpiece. 

And you know what? It turns out that it was a fabulously terrible idea! Every single actor performs with such a wooden and emotionless acting that just watching them speak their lines makes you cringe. Arnold always seemed out of it in almost every single scene as though all he thought about during the scene shootings was the steak dinner back at the trailer.

Before we get into the story itself, it should be clear that "The Running Man" embraces one last 80's action stereotype and that is that the main character is a cop. Arnold starts the film as an awesome cop and uses his amazing cop skills throughout the movie. Did you know that police recruits in that decade were taught terrible one-liners at the Police Academy? I was surprised that Arnie didn't end up putting on a robot suit and travel through time like a true policeman should and it wouldn't matter anyways since the movie throws out almost every aspect of the  novel, leaving behind the bare skeletal remains of the original "The Running Man".

Let's do a quick comparison of the beginning of the book and the movie version of "The Running Man". 

Book:

Set in a dystopian American society in the future, our story features a man named Ben Richards. The year is 2025 and the United States is a complete police state that blacklists members of society based on their trades. Richards is blacklisted which puts his family into total poverty since nobody will ever hire him. With absolutely no income, Richards finds that he cannot provide money to pay for the medicine to treat his daughter's terminal illness. After his wife resorts to prostitution to earn some sort of money, Richards volunteers to join "The Running Man", a government funded and broadcast reality game show. In "The Running Man", contestants have 30 days to stay alive and run from the Hunters: Government hitmen hired to kill the contestants. The contestants can run anywhere in the world to escape from the Hunters as long as they send two video messages a day back to the television studio.

Movie:

By the time the year 2017 rolls around (three years from now!) the United States has run short on resources and for some reason decides that they need to turn themselves into a totalitarian police state run by the TV show producer and host of the game show "The Running Man" the man himself: Damion Killion. In the year 2019, Ben Richards is a helicopter pilot of a police chopper and he is given orders to massacre a large group of poverty stricken people receiving food for absolutely no reason. Richards goes against his orders and is sent to a labor camp after his immediate arrest. Some underground resistance movement is formed in the prison and eventually the prisoners plan a daring escape. The only issue with their plan is that the border of the labor camp is surrounded by a radio signal that alerts the prisoner's dog collars if they go past the border. If this signal is sent out, the collars will explode along with the heads of their wearers. The prisoners find out they can shut down this radio signal by entering in a specific code that only the guards know. Fortunately, the guards have the intelligence of mentally deficient Star Wars stormtroopers and one of the prisoners finds this code by looking over the shoulder of the radio signal operator. That's it. No cool hacking sequences only an 80's movie can provide. No torturing the info out of a poor guard. No bribery. Nothing cool at all. All he does is look over the guard's shoulder like a middle school student cheating on a math test.

If you think I'm exaggerating I'm not. He LITERALLY LOOKS OVER HIS SHOULDER.

After the prisoners escape with a simple iPhone passcode and the sheer power of Arnold's biceps. Surprise surprise, Ben Richards is a lone wolf and won't join the resistance movement because he wants to find work and start his life over. Long story short, the cops arrest him and he's forced into "The Running Man" game show because Damion Killion thinks he looks cool.

Well... At least the director got the names and the basic premises right! Everything else in the movie is completely different in every way possible. Thank God Stephen King wrote "The Running Man" under the alias of Richard Bachman because I personally would be ashamed to see my name in the title credits. The original story was a tale of desperation and taking the absolute last option possible because a man will do anything for his family. I'm not going to lie, the film adaptation isn't an adaptation. It's just flat out stupid and the logic is flawed all over. For example, Ben Richards escapes prison and goes to look for work so he can renew himself or some bullshit. Do I need to mention that it's incredibly difficult to maintain a low profile when you look like this:

Oddly enough, if you Google "Arnold Schwarzenegger 80's" about half the images are of Sylvester Stallone

Now I'm no expert on dystopian America stories but I'm pretty sure that the country wouldn't be flooded with thickly accented Austrians, so that's another giveaway. 

After about an hour, Ben Richards is finally put into "The Running Man" and the games begin. Except the rules are much different in the book. The Hunters are actually called The Stalkers and the only way to win the game is to kill or subdue all the Stalkers. Interestingly enough, Killion doesn't release tons of Stalkers all at once but releases each one at Arnold Musclehead one at a time and to nobody's surprise, the creative staff behind this movie was so focused on making cool characters that the Stalkers end up just being stupid. One of them is Oddjob that plays a deadly game of hockey named Sub-Zero.

"Guys seriously, what is this nonsense?!"

The next one that is released is Buzzsaw. All I could say about Buzzsaw was that he's essentially a slightly overweight Scott Steiner with a chainsaw.

"HOLLER IF YOU HEAR ME USING A PROP CHAINSAW WITH THE SOUND MIXING COMPLETELY OFF!"

And the absolute worse Stalker in the whole movie, this guy:

He sings opera and shoots lighting. Plus, his armor lights up like a Christmas tree. His name is Dynamo. I'm not making this up.

There were two more Stalkers that were in the movie for all of five seconds each but they're so unimportant it's not worth the time looking for pictures of them on the internet. The only thing you should care about those two is that one of them was Jesse "The Body" Ventura and his name was Captain Freedom. There's a scene where he outwardly rebels against the TV show crew and angrily spewing about how "The Running Man" is a sport that showcases the beauty of combat between two humans and shouldn't have men in funny armor using useless weapons. It was kinda cool except I think that Ventura forgot he was in a movie and was still in his wrestling character. I think he thought he was arguing with Vinnie Mac about the current state of 80's WWF and the film crew just kinda recorded the whole thing because after that scene, Captain Freedom never comes up again for the rest of the movie.

I would probably give the blatant stupidity of the Stalkers a pass if it wasn't for the fact that Ben Richards disposed of them so easily. None of the five Stalkers lived longer than about ten minutes during the movie and each one had to listen to Arnold quipping stupid one-liners about their deaths.

Which is another thing that got my attention. Holy crap are there one-liners. Here's a few of my favorites:

"Hey Killion! Here's Sub-Zero! Now he's Plain-Zero!"

"Jam the network? Jam it up your ass!"

"I love this saw. This saw is a part of me and I'm gonna make it a part of you!"

You know the famous line from The Terminator that Arnie utters because the cops won't let him into the police station? That one famous line that's on freaking t-shirts? This one right here:

That line was spoken in 1984 which is three years previous to "The Running Man" release. Guess what? THE PAY HOMAGE TO ANOTHER STUPID 80's ACTION MOVIE FEATURING ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER COMING FROM A DYSTOPIAN AMERICAN FUTURE AS A ROBOT! In the movie "The Running Man"! Take a look:

One last thing I noticed about this movie is that the sound mixing is absolutely dreadful. In the beginning there are several scenes where I cannot hear the actor's lines because the sound of gunfire is cranked up too freaking loud. I don't just mean I can't hear Arnold's thickly accented lines, I can't even hear some of the lines the American actors are speaking. When you add the music on top of the sound effects, the only thing left over is a blurb of sound coming out of the actor's moving mouth. They could have been lip syncing their lines at several moments in the movie and I wouldn't have noticed. 

FINAL VERDICT:

I have complained about "The Running Man" way longer than I wanted to. This movie appeals to only the audience that wants to watch awful 80's action movies. If you're looking for a movie that takes itself seriously with actual actors then look somewhere else. Sometimes the movie has its moments where it's actually kind of fun to watch and the movie might even be pretty fun if you watch it with other people. The only other part of the movie I enjoyed is seeing the ending credit scroll down the screen to the terrible 80's power ballad "Restless Heart". But for the most part, the only reason somebody should watch this movie is because for some reason, modern culture references this movie all the damn time. Also, for some reason, you can't seriously call yourself a movie buff unless you've seen this movie. Why? Hell if I know.

4/10