The Running Manand Keeper
THE RUNNING MAN. Even back in the salad days of ridiculous action movies, of impossible physiques and ridiculous armaments, The Running Man (1987) struck me as second tier. Maybe because it wasn’t grounded in a recognizable reality, or because it was released so close to Predator (also 1987) and Die Hard (1988) and The Terminator (1984) and the first few Rambo installments — or because my parents were less interested in watching it — it felt like a miss. Admittedly, I did not see the thing in that peak era, circling back to it years later, but I suspect that even if I had, with the eyes of less jaded, more impressionable youth, my reaction might not have been all that different. I wouldn’t learn until much later, of course, that the production was troubled from the beginning, that The Running Man perhaps could have been a more prescient, incisive adaptation of the Richard Bachman (RIP Stephen King’s alter ego) novel, but the final result, as delivered to the audience, failed to fully alloy its bloodthirsty ’80s steeliness to the professional wrestling silliness of its attempted spectacle. Seen now, it plays deeply dated, hobbled not as much by the limitations of contemporary filmcraft as by its weird tonality. And so, as Schwarzenegger himself has intoned, it may be primary among his peak-era projects in meriting an update. And, pointedly, I’m told the novel is set in 2025.
In the first cinematic iteration, though, the action takes place in a dystopian 2019 — a dismal, if still fanciful techo-future — where a nation ravaged by capitalism, I guess, sits transfixed by the titular television game show, wherein civilians are pitted against an array of loony goons (some on roller skates, if memory serves) in a winner-take-all battle to the death. Solid premise.
Edgar Wright, as big a movie-nerd as any working director (thankfully, a little less vociferous about his bona fides), is clearly a fan of the action cinema upon which so many of us cut our critical teeth. His movies are partly defined by reference and reverence, but he has also synthesized his influences into a filmmaking vernacular that, without fail, enlivens his material with technique that is as exciting as it is exacting. Most of us caught on with Shaun of the Dead (2004), which in turn led us back to his British comedy series Spaced (1999), the crucible that produced his fruitful collaborations with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. In the intervening decades, Wright has, despite everything wrong with the modern movie industry, managed to build a formidable canon of elevated popcorn delights, movies that belie the depth and breadth of the director’s technical acumen with humor and crowd-pleasingness.
And now, with co-writer Michael Bacall, Wright has gone back to the source material and reminted The Running Man as a pure action-comedy that, without force-feeding us, offers a commentary on wealth-disparity and the centralization of influence that has proven so corrosive in real-time.
In Co-Op City, Ben Richards (Glen Powell) has proven himself too honest and unwilling to bend to a corporate structure intent on disempowering the worker. Too poor to provide medicine for his ailing toddler, with his wife pulling triple shifts at a nightclub/bordello, he burns his final bridge with his employer and, in desperation, auditions for a variety of network TV shows. Lustful for fresh meat, the tooth-gnashing producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) hand picks Richards as the newest would-be star of The Running Man show. The premise is simple: Survive for 30 days with the whole country and a cadre of assassins in hot pursuit, win $1B New Dollars. The game is rigged, of course; what fun would it be otherwise? And so we follow ever-resourceful but vastly outgunned Ben on a desperate chase through the American Northeast and on a mission to combat the disinformation and disempowerment wrought by the military-entertainment complex.
The Running Man stumbles, just slightly, in its final act, but everything up to that point is in finest Wright form, rocketing from one elegantly constructed action set-piece to another. To its eternal credit, the movie knows what it is, girding the action just enough with its criticism of our current, muddled, flailing cultural moment. R. 134M. BROADWAY.
KEEPER. Osgood Perkins, who seems to work as much as anybody but John Swab, has had three movies in wide theatrical release in the last year and a half. Not everybody liked The Monkey (another Stephen King adaptation), maybe because it traded the dread of Longlegs (2024) for cheeky splatter humor; I found it delightful. Perkins has game, though, and a seemingly bottomless well of inspiration that has now yielded a creeping kinda-sorta folk horror set in an isolated house in the woods.
From a screenplay by Nick Lepard, Keeper finds artist Liz (Tatiana Maslany) setting out to spend a weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), her doctor boyfriend of a year, in his family’s isolated cabin. Seems idyllic, but from the jump things aren’t nearly as pleasant, romantic, or non-supernatural as Liz would hope.
With this most recent volley of work, Perkins has proven himself to me as a standout in the fairly glutted field of modest-budgeted horror. He can shift his tone and style to suit the material, but everything he does is imbued with a dark, deeply satisfying sense of humor and executed with great craft and care. Keeper is something of a clinic for the wannabes, a study in cultivated, locked-room dread elevated by its visual style and the unerring commitment of its cast. R. 99M. BROADWAY.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
NOW PLAYING
BLACK PHONE 2. Scary sequel for the kids, now teens, getting supernatural calls and pursued by the masked Grabber (Ethan Hawke). R. 114M. BROADWAY.
BUGONIA. Emma Stone as a CEO kidnapped by conspiracy theorists. With Jesse Plemons. R. 118M. MINOR.
NOW YOU SEE ME: NOW YOU DON’T. The Horsemen team up with younger illusionists for a diamond heist sequel. PG13. 112M. BROADWAY.
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. Locally filmed comedy/action/drama with Leonardo DiCaprio in Humboldt drag as an ex-revolutionary single dad searching for his daughter. R. 161M. MINOR.
PREDATOR: BADLANDS. A runt alien hunter (Dimitrius Schuster-Kolomatangi) goes after the biggest game on a hostile planet, half a droid (Elle Fanning) in tow. PG13. 107M. BROADWAY .
REGRETTING YOU. A widow and her teen daughter wrestle with complicated grief. PG13. 117M. BROADWAY.
RENTAL FAMILY. Evidently Japan has national healthcare, and you can rent Brendan Fraser to be part of your family, so what are we doing here? PG13. 103M. BROADWAY.
SARAH’S OIL. Based on the true story of an African American girl who struck oil. PG. 103M. BROADWAY.
SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE. Sequel to the relentless Finnish action movie about a Nazi-shredding ex-soldier (Jorma Tommila), this time with the Red Army commander (Stephen Lang) who killed his family. R. 88M. BROADWAY.
WICKED: FOR GOOD. Elphaba and Glinda reunite from opposite sides of the yellow brick tracks to save Oz in the sequel. PG. 137M. BROADWAY (3D), MINOR.
For showtimes, call Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456, Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.
This article appears in The Stopwatch.