1 out of 5 stars (one of the worst of the year)
The Running Man is hands down one of the worst movies I’ve seen in 2025. It’s a science fiction movie so busy with pedantically lecturing you about its “fight the system” themes that little things like consistent worldbuilding, an engaging story, and characters you can latch onto never enter the conversation. Add a shockingly miscast Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone But You) as the leading man and writer-director Edgar Wright’s usual wit and style completely out the building, and you have the film equivalent of your average angry Twitterer: A loud, annoying, and childish rant that thinks it’s the smartest person in the universe.
In Dystopian Future #8,567, Ben Richards (Glen Powell) lives in the slums with his wife Sheila (A totally wasted Jayme Lawson, Sinners) and 2-year-old daughter. Ben lost his job for a vaguely described altercation that happened offscreen and desperately needs money to get medication for the kid. His only option? Sign up for The Running Man: A game show and unholy union of The Hunger Games and The Purge where you must survive for 30 days while everyone on the planet has a license to kill you, but you get a huge payout if you survive. Assisted by a conveyer belt of recognizable stars in small roles, Ben must survive one day at a time as he slowly realizes how corrupt the surrounding system really is.
Glen Powell has a lot of heat on him right now for his excellent supporting performance in Top Gun: Maverick and proved his comedy chops with Anyone But You, but The Running Man shows his limitations as a leading man. Powell fails to sell Ben’s seething anger at the world around him and rarely gets to show the charm that makes him an attractive star, but this script is such a soaked dog that anyone would have struggled to salvage it. We don’t get time to care about Ben or what’s at stake for him before the action starts, the dystopian universe and people in it are jarringly inconsistent (Ben can walk around in cheap disguises with almost nobody recognizing him or looking for him despite his face being plastered all over the place, this hyper-militarized world has anti-authority graffiti in broad daylight without consequence, and Ben is somehow the first contestant in 20 SEASONS of this show to get wise to its insidiousness).
The action of The Running Man is also forgettable and lacks Edgar Wright’s usual kinetic style, the movie uses its characters as mouthpieces to soapbox about its ideas rather than explore them intelligently, and smugly puffs out its chest as if it’s the first film ever to criticize widespread corporate corruption. Newsflash: Without characters and a story I care about, whatever message you have means nothing to me, and this is the poster child for that. I’ve only walked out of one movie in 20 years of reviewing them (and even that was on the last scene), but The Running Man was almost the 2nd. I stayed until the end credits, but evaporated faster than this movie’s miserable box office projections as soon as they rolled.
To end positively, Colman Domingo (who’s also a voice in Wicked: For Good later this week) is excellent as the show’s energetic host and enlivens the proceedings whenever present, so I hope his star continues rising. Besides that, The Running Man is a tired, irritating, and self-satisfied misfire you should sprint from like your life hangs in the balance. I hate this movie.
Rated R for Strong Violence, Some Gore, and Language