The reviews are in, and so far the response to Edgar Wright’s new interpretation of Stephen King’s “The Running Man” novel has met a mixed response.
With 66 reviews counted, the film sits at just 62% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 59/100 on Metacritic, putting it firmly in the mixed range and the lowest scoring of Wright’s directorial efforts to date.
General consensus is that the film plays it much more seriously and closer to the King novel than the previous Schwarzenegger-led version, but that approach doesn’t necessarily work for Wright’s sensibilities and the overall production has conflicting tones that are jarring.
Here’s a sampling of reviews:
“The original was a lumbering Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. You could say that Edgar Wright, the director of the new version, has made it into a decent Bruce Willis movie” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“It’s perhaps Wright’s first feature to feel, in a positive way, like the work of a director for hire: every flourish and trick here isn’t in service of a singular creative vision so much as a great, rumbling excitement machine.” – Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph
“For all the targets that director and co-writer Edgar Wright hits with the story’s political and media satire, he allows the pacing to go slack, turning what should feel like an escalating set of stakes into an episodic series of vignettes” – Alonso Duralde, The Film Verdict
“It’s a movie that lives up to its heritage but gets a little tonally caught between the book and its first, more Arnold-y adaptation, and does a few different things pretty well instead of doing one thing really well.” – Clint Cage, IGN
“Largely faithful but unwilling to pick a funny or nasty lane, it’s the most impersonal film of its writer/director’s career, and a revolutionary thriller that too often falls back on establishment conventions.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
“Wright’s grim, grayed-out backdrop feels ripped from King’s pages, but the tone isn’t quite right. The filmmaker’s great gift is for pop uplift, and his buoyant sensibility is at odds with the heavy melancholy of King’s tale” – Adam Nayman, The Toronto Star
“Perhaps there’s just no squaring the circle of an Edgar Wright-helmed The Running Man film. The director is attuned to the grotesque absurdities of the future world that King imagined, but he doesn’t have the acidic instincts of a Carpenter or Verhoeven.” – Andrew Wyatt, The Take-Up
“There are fits and spurts of ’80s action cheese but, for the most part, the script is wildly inconsistent in terms of tone while characters are wafer thin caricatures.” – Kristen Lopez, The Film Maven
“The Running Man is a sloppy collage of violence, action, and cheap jokes that is far more style than substance.” – Kristy Puchko, Mashable
Boasting a budget of around $110 million, “The Running Man” is slated to hit cinemas this Friday and is projected to have a $17-18 million opening weekend.
