The Running Man (1987) – Review

There have been many screen adaptations of the works of legendary horror writer Stephen King, some that have resulted in great movies like The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me but we’ve also had to suffer through the likes of Dreamcatcher and The Dark Tower, but in 1987 the world was treated to a film based on a book written by King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, a film that starred the king of action 80s films, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man isn’t quite an “In Name Only” adaptation of the book but what similarities the film has with its source material are few and far between. The novel is set in a dystopian United States during the year 2025, in which the nation’s economy is in ruins and world violence is rising and people participate in violent game shows so that their families can receive whatever winnings are earned – the participants are not expected to survive – the main character is a man named Ben Richards who needs money for his gravely ill daughter’s medicine. After rigorous physical testing and mental testing, he is chosen for The Running Man, the Network’s most popular, lucrative and dangerous program, where the contestants are declared enemies of the State and are sent on the run. While they are allowed to go anywhere in the world they are chased and hounded by the general public, who get a huge bounty if they kill them. But the Network doesn’t rely on the bloodthirsty public as they also send out professional hitmen to ensure that there are no survivors, needless to say, not much of that survived the transition to the big screen.

Note: The Ben Richards of the book was your basic every-man and while he is physically fit he is no Superman and certainly not built like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The protagonist of the movie may be named Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger) but he is nothing like his book counterpart, in this version he is a police helicopter pilot who refuses to fire on a group of unarmed civilians during a food riot and then framed by the government as the “Butcher of Bakersfield” for the very thing he was attempting to stop. So yeah, right off the bat the movie quickly diverged from the source material in favour of making this a more typical Arnie action flick. That’s not to say this is a bad thing, as 80s action movies go this one is a lot of fun, but gone is the thoughtful dystopian tale from the book in favour of over-the-top action moments and a handful of Arnie’s trademark one-liners. The book also didn’t have a female sidekick which the film gives us in the form of network employee Amber Mendez (María Conchita Alonso) who starts as a hostage but ends up tossed into the Running Man game when she starts to question the facts surrounding the “Bakersfield Massacre.” To say their relationship has a rocky start would be a vast understatement.

What’s a little bondage between friends?

Where the book had the game take place all across the globe, with the protagonist hounded by informers and professional hitmen, the movie places the game in four quadrants of a confined neighbourhood that was destroyed during a past earthquake. They are hunted by armed mercenaries called “Stalkers” who look more like Marvel Comic supervillains than they do professional killers. It’s clear this movie was borrowing quite a few elements from the World Wrestling Federation as the Stalkers are larger-than-life personas and quite flamboyant – casting several actual wrestlers hammers that point home quite nicely – and they are easily the most memorable element of the movie. Of course, the idea of the government using entertainment to placate the masses is nothing new, the Roman Empire practically invented it with their “Bread and Circuses” gladiatorial games, and as a science fiction trope it’s been mined quite often – the original Star Trek series even had an episode called “Bread and Circuses” – but it was with this movie that the idea of using flamboyant gladiators took the concept to the next level, giving us the likes of Stalker turned commentator “Captain Freedom” (Jesse Ventura), the pyrotechnical “Fireball” (Jim Brown), a chainsaw toting “Buzzsaw” (Gus Rethwisch), the chilling killer “Professor Subzero” (Professor Toru Tanaka) and the electrifying opera singer “Dynamo” (Erland Van Lidth) who all do their best to bring down Ben Richards.

Note: As cool as Jim Brown was, and I admire Professor Toru Tanaka with all my heart, but the title of best Stalker belongs to Erland Van Lidth as Dynamo, he was right kind of over-the-top character that this movie needed.

Now, as cool and badass as all those Stalkers were the real star of The Running Man is its amoral host Damon Killian (Richard Dawson), whose casual cruelty to all – even to his own staff let alone the people whom he sends out into the game to die – made him a truly great villain and proved to the world that Arnie didn’t need musclebound adversaries or creatures from outer space to be a good antagonist.  Even though Richard Dawson certainly couldn’t take Arnie in a fight he was the figurehead of all the evils that this totalitarian society represented and thus he was the perfect embodiment of what our heroes were fighting against. You can’t punch a government or a corporation in the face but you can take your anger out on their spokesperson, and in that area, Richard Dawson excelled at creating a truly smarmy villain, one that had us eager to see get his comeuppance.

Note: Numerous people who worked with Richard Dawson on Family Feud say that in real life Dawson was quite a bit like his character Damon Killian in his nasty handling of underlings.

Stray Observations:

• The opening text crawl tells us that “By 2017, the world economy has collapsed. Food, natural resources and oil are in short supply. A police state, divided into Paramilitary Zones, rules with an iron hand.” While this didn’t quite come to pass give it a few more years and we still might get there.
• We get a commercial for a game show called “Climbing for Dollars” which is the only hint of there being other violent game shows for the public to watch.
• The footage of the attacking helicopters is lifted from the 1976 King Kong remake which had me wishing to see a fight between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kong.
• Mendez finds the original unedited footage of the Bakersfield massacre, but what purpose could the government have for keeping such damning evidence around?
• If Richard hadn’t refused to fire on the rioters how would they have spun the massacre without a patsy to frame? Would they have claimed, “They were coming right at us!”
• The game’s professional killers are called “Stalkers” but as the contestants have been injected with tracking devices, and the course they run is heavily monitored, it doesn’t require much in the way of stalking skills to track your prey.

As if giving them high-tech weaponry wasn’t enough of an advantage.

Even though Tri-Star’s The Running Man was not all that faithful to the source material, something that plagues most Stephen King adaptations, the result was still a very entertaining film – though its entertainment value will hinge on your ability to handle an overabundance of Arnie one-liners – and the film’s production value is excellent as is Schwarzenegger’s supporting cast, which includes the likes of Yaphet Kotto and Mick Fleetwood as freedom fighters. The film has developed a bit of a cult following over the years but it still falls below the upper echelon of 1980s action films and is considered by many as a lesser Arnie outing. Overall, this over-the-top satire is a fun critique of American television culture that will continue to engage fans of the sci-fi action genre and is easily one of the entertaining takes on The Most Dangerous Game.