The Running Man
(1987)
Circa 2019, five years from, now the world will be very
different. But not unfamiliar. It will resemble nothing so much as an ‘80s TV
movie, complete with rock video lighting, spandex and really crappy computer
graphics. Anyone who says The Running Man
is more relevant than ever is missing the point that this could be said of
pretty much any vision of a future
dystopia where totalitarian regimes keep the population in check with violent
entertainment. From Nigel Kneales Year of
the Sex Olympics to Rollerball and
onwards. The Running Man could have
been the defining comment of its decade in this regard, but it felt passé then
and just looks badly dated now.
Which isn’t to say it doesn’t have its pleasures, mostly in the
first half. But so much of The Running
Man relies on Arnie doing his thing, armed with a tirade of mostly lowbrow
quips, that any pretensions towards social commentary or satire are lost in the
melee. This, after all, was the year of Robocop,
which did the corporate, and media satire with acumen that still impresses. The
Running Man underwhelmed me at the time, and it hasn’t gained anything in the quarter
century-plus since. It’s interesting to look at the period immediately prior to
Arnie’s great awakening as a mega-star. There was every chance his next movie
would be a stinker as one to rate. On the credit side he had Conan the Barbarian, Terminator and the previous summer’s Predator (The Running Man was released in November ’87). On the debit, well Commando has its fans but I’m not one of
them and Raw Deal plain stinks. The
following summer came Twins, and
really broke him in with a mass audience. There was no looking back.
To his credit the actor’s upfront about the picture’s
failings, claiming it lost the depth of the source material. Then again, this
is an actor who couldn’t see that his casting in Total Recall was conceptually completely at odds with the premise,
so what he says needs a pinch of salt. Stephen King/Richard Bachmann’s novel is
very different. The hero enters the contest to win money to treat his sickly
daughter (corny as hell, so not a bad move to ditch that bit), and events take
place on a global scale. It also features a decidedly downbeat ending. The
movie’s upbeat solution withstands no scrutiny whatsoever, providing Arnie with
clear-cut evidence of innocence of alleged crimes and focusing on humanity’s
salvation by means of taking control of the TV studio’s satellite uplink. They Live! did something not dissimilar
a year later, but had attitude to spare and didn’t go all happy-happy-joy-joy.
Beating a police state by shooting the shit out of a TV studio doesn’t really fly.
Inevitably, parallels have been drawn with The
Hunger Games but they really highlight that it isn’t so much there’s only
so many ideas out there, rather the importance thing is how you realise them
(I’m not going to preach The Hunger Games
as anything truly special, but it does what it does reasonably effectively).
It could have been very different. Ex-Starsky Paul Michael
Glaser had his director training on his hit TV show, before graduating to further
TV work (including an episode of the short-lived Otherworld and the none-more-‘80s Miami Vice). The Running Man
was his sophomore movie, but he only got the gig after several directors fell
out. George Pan Cosmatos (perhaps no great loss) left over script
disagreements. Alex Cox was approached but was busy with Walker; that he was up for it is intriguing enough, since he would
surely have made the most of its satirical content (I can’t see that he’d ever
have got as far as shooting if he had been free, given his penchant for
self-immolation, but it’s definitely a version of The Running Man I would love to have seen). Then there’s Andrew
Davis, who was briefly in demand during the ‘90s following Under Siege and The Fugitive
but whose career was fizzling by the time he actually got to make a whole movie
with Arnie (2002’s Collateral Damage,
at which point the Austrian Oak was in such a career pickle only a third Terminator would induce anyone to see
his pictures).
The story is Davis was fired after eight days and going $8m
over budget, but that smacks of producer myth-making. The star clearly learnt
his lesson, though, as he spent the next decade aligning himself with A-list
directors. Around the time Eraser
happened, when he couldn’t attract the “auteurs” any more, Arnie began his tumble.
Or perhaps he just could no longer get a fix on the material. He must have recognised
Paul Verhoeven could have made great things of The Running Man in his sleep as, for all its failings, Total Recall is a much, much sharper
picture.
So Glaser, with a severe shortage of style at his beck and
call, does his best. It just isn’t good enough. He pulls of a couple of coups.
Richard Dawson as the smooth-as-silk game show host Killian is easily the best
of these. Dawson started out as an actor (Hogan’s
Heroes was his longest running role) but was best known as presenter of Family Feud (Family Fortunes is the UK version), so he knew all the moves. He’s
more than happy to make Killian an irredeemable slimeball, one who knows just
how to charm the old dears in the audience. The rest of the casting is
uniformly mixed. Maria Conchita Alonso is fairly terrible, but then she often
is. In fairness, she’s been saddled with playing a complete idiot. Yaphet Kotto
is utterly wasted; I hope his paycheque made up for it (at least Alonso Mosley
was just around the corner). Then there are the random choices, none of which
add anything (Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa).
Steven E de Souza, fresh from Arnie hit Commando and immediately prior to Die Hard (after which it’s all downhill), adapts King’s book. It’s
not clear how much of what ends up on screen is his and how much was amended
along the way by the procession of directors. We’re told that in 2017 the world
economy has collapsed (okay, I’ll give them that bit). Food, natural resources
and oil are in short supply. A police state, divided into paramilitary zones “rules with an iron hand” (that old
chestnut). The opening text is a parade of clichés; dissent is not tolerated,
state TV provides the most popular show (The
Running Man) and all art, music and history is censored. But a “small resistance movement has managed to
survive underground”.
What with the cheap graphics and electronic score, you’d be
forgiven for thinking this might be the prelude to another outing for Snake
Plissken (now, that might have
worked, particularly when he doesn’t give a shit about saving the human race
from slavery). But it isn’t to be; Harold Faltermeyer provides the score, not
John Carpenter (even Faltermeyer’s Axel F gets a bit annoying when it plays
incessantly throughout the movie; he doesn’t have the range to score an entire
film). Arnie’s Ben Richards won’t open fire on unarmed civilians so he’s framed
as “The Butcher of Bakersfield” and sent to a forced labour camp. Cue a glue-on
beard and an escape attempt of the exploding heads variety (surely an influence
on Christopher Lambert-starrer Fortress a
few years later). It isn’t long before he ends up on TV in an attempt to
bolster flatlining ratings.
Turning the movie into an arena-style contest enables Arnie
to go head-to-head with an array of opponents and, in set-up at least, this
ensures he had a decent underdog footing. But the execution is so
unimaginative. From the characteristics of his opponents to the terrain in
which he fights (the remains of the ’97 quake), to the little fact that all the
freedom fighters wear berets, the picture is left relying wholly on the promise
of a next kill to come. In that sense, there’s a cuteness to the crowd switching
allegiance and rooting for him, since their bloodlust mirrors that of the
cinema audience. But since this kind of “They’re us, you know” subtext is
ten-a-penny in this sort of picture it’s not much to bray about. Most of the
“Stalkers” have little to distinguish them, aside from the manner of their
demise. There’s Fireball (Jim Brown), Buzzsaw (Gus Rethwisch), and Subzero
(Toru Tanaka). Dynamo (Erland van Lidth), with his operatic stylings and Perspex
centurion outfit, is at least random enough to attract attention. He also wears
what looks like a giant nappy when he attempts to rape Alonso’s character (“I’ll show you dickless”), in a crass
scene typical of the picture’s lurch into bargain basement plotting. However,
mayor Jesse Ventura, who also co-starred in Predator with Arnie, makes the most of his bit as Captain Freedom,
host of Captain Freedom’s Work Out,
and he seems to have as much of a sense of self-mockery here as he did as Predator’s “goddam sexual tyrannosaurus”.
This is a future where digital matting has been perfected,
so they got that right, but Star Trek
is long forgotten (“Who’s Mr Spock?”)
Audiences receive gifts so crappy it could be an episode of Crackerjack. Due to the vagaries of
plotting, the network can’t even be arsed to clean up the evidence of previous
“winners” (their corpses are conveniently easy to find, the evidence ready and
waiting to be broadcast to a suddenly outraged population). For every neat joke
(Climbing for Dollars, featuring a
guy trying to escape a pack of dogs up a rope; “I’m your court-appointed theatrical agent” announces a man in a
suit to Arnie; “and not surprisingly
she’s flouted the law and traditional morality all her life” says the
announcer introducing Amber as a contestant) there’s a lousy one (Hate Boat?) and the sub-Network moral speech (“We give them what they want”) is only
made vaguely tolerable thanks to Dawson’s spirited delivery.
And, of course, there are the Arnie one-liners. Sometimes
more than one when he offs a bad guy. “Don’t
forget to send me a copy,” he quips after using a pen to stab his agent in
the back, through the contract he has just signed. “I’ll be back” he informs Killian (who gets the superior comeback “Only in a re-run”). “He was a real pain in the neck” after
garrotting Subzero with barbed wire. “He
had to split!” having carbed Buzzsaw through the groin with his own
chainsaw. “What a hot head” is his
verdict after torching Fireball. His response to an invitation to “Drop dead”; “I don’t do requests”.
As Arnie movies go, there’s far more value to remaking this
than Total Recall, or semi-rebooting Terminator, since it was never highly
regarded and it actually does have a reasonable premise. But I don’t think
there’s any way this wouldn’t seem derivative and redundant now. Or rather,
King’s original novel, adapted with the surveillance society in mind, might
actually have some merit (minus the rather trite ending). But as a timely media
satire, the potential of The Running Man
has long since been exhausted.
**1/2