The Running Man (15, 133 mins)
Verdict: Breathlessly pacy
For nigh on half a century, Stephen King’s novels and short stories have been adapted, often brilliantly, for the screen.
The latest addition to a list that begins with Carrie in 1976, and includes The Shining (1980), Stand By Me (1986), Misery (1990) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994), is Edgar Wright’s dystopian thriller The Running Man. It is not out of place in such illustrious company.
Under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, King wrote The Running Man in 1982, setting it, as it happens, in the distant year 2025.
King’s vision of America in that weirdly futuristic-sounding year was grim. A tyrannical police state, a car-crash economy, and a downtrodden population obsessed with reality TV shows. Outlandish, I know.
The Running Man was first made into a film in 1987, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
This version is not a straight remake, although there’s a wink to the original with an image of big Arnie fleetingly glimpsed on US banknotes, known as ‘new’ dollars.
This is a better movie, more faithful to the book, and directed with terrific pizazz by Wright, adding a big-budget blockbuster to an admirably varied portfolio that includes the psychological horror Last Night In Soho (2021), the romantic action thriller Baby Driver (2017), and of course his celebrated ‘Cornetto’ trilogy, the Brit-coms Shaun Of The Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007) and The World’s End (2013).
Glen Powell plays Ben Richards, a construction worker repeatedly fired for insubordination and ‘subversive’ union activities, whose raging sense of injustice builds as he fails to find the job he needs to provide for his wife, a nightclub hostess, and their sick daughter
So in desperation he applies to be a contestant on The Running Man, a deadly ‘game’ show in which ‘Runners’ can win a billion-dollar prize if, for 30 days, they manage to elude not just a team of professional assassins but also the great American public, who will be rewarded for helping to eliminate them
Glen Powell plays Ben Richards, a construction worker repeatedly fired for insubordination and ‘subversive’ union activities, whose raging sense of injustice builds as he fails to find the job he needs to provide for his wife, a nightclub hostess, and their sick daughter.
So in desperation he applies to be a contestant on The Running Man, a deadly ‘game’ show in which ‘Runners’ can win a billion-dollar prize if, for 30 days, they manage to elude not just a team of professional assassins but also the great American public, who will be rewarded for helping to eliminate them.
What ensues, more topically than Wright can possibly have imagined when he co-wrote the screenplay (with Michael Bacall), is basically a saga of traitors and faithfuls, with Ben on the run never knowing who he can trust.
His travails are broadcast on TV every evening, with Josh Brolin as the show’s wickedly manipulative, all-powerful producer, and Colman Domingo as its super-slick host, reminiscent not so much of a Winkleman as a Flickerman – Stanley Tucci’s Caesar Flickerman in The Hunger Games films.
There are further distinct echoes of The Hunger Games, and of the recent The Long Walk, yet another Stephen King adaptation, which rather underlines the fact that The Running Man doesn’t exactly pulsate with originality.
Yet it’s exciting and energetic, and Powell is a charismatic lead who, by his own account on Graham Norton’s sofa last week, was given extensive tips on how to perform his own stunts by his Top Gun: Maverick co-star Tom Cruise. Apparently, Cruise told him to scrutinise himself running, because nobody running ever looks as cool as they think they do.
So he got coached to do it better, and duly nails it. Which in truth is the least we should expect of the star of a film called The Running Man.
Nuremberg (15, 148 mins)
Verdict: Too showy by half
And so to a film called Nuremberg, which also comes with a set of expectations attached; for in the context of Nazism the word Nuremberg is freighted with meaning.
James Vanderbilt’s movie tells the story of the Nuremberg trials following the Second World War, with a particular focus on the prosecution of Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second-in-command, played with malevolent charm by a suitably hefty Russell Crowe.
It’s a mighty subject, and Stanley Kramer’s star-spangled 1961 film Judgement At Nuremberg made a much better job of tackling it.
This one is starry too, but a miscast Rami Malek lets the side down with some showy, over-the-top acting in the role of Douglas Kelley, the American psychiatrist who, with the help of an army translator played by Leo Woodall, assesses Goering and other Nazi top brass before they arrive in the dock.
Russell Crowe plays leading Nazi Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second-in-command
Kelley is a nifty amateur magician, but Malek’s unwitting trick is to make his character a sight creepier than most of the Nazis.
Michael Shannon, as Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, gives a typically solid performance; and as lead British prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe, Richard E. Grant reaches languidly into his starched upper-crust playbook.
But there’s some really clunky exposition in this film and an even clunkier reconstruction of Rudolf Hess’s notorious 1941 flight to Scotland.
Significantly, the most powerful sequence by far, actual newsreel footage of Belsen, Buchenwald and other death camps, is the only bit of Nuremberg that isn’t dramatised.
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