The Running Man is an 80s sci-fi/action/comedy (kind of) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, María Conchita Alsonso, Richard Dawson, Yaphet Kotto, Marvin J. McIntyre, Mick Fleetwood, Jesse Ventura, Professor Toru Tanaka, Jim Brown, Erland Van Lidth, and Gus Rethwisch. It's only a "comedy" in the way that most of Arnie's earlier action movies are - he kills people and then quips.
It's the distant, futuristic year of...2017 (oof) and the USA has become a totalitarian state, which of course is ridiculous satire and could never...yeah. Anyway, Ben Richards (Schwarzenegger) is a cop (boo) flying a helicopter over a food riot and is ordered to kill all the protestors. He refuses, is subdued, and then is blamed for the ensuing massacre. He escapes from prison and is quickly recaptured, and given to the TV network (a subsidiary of the Department of Justice) for their hit show, The Running Man.
On this show, convicted criminals and dissidents get dropped into a combat zone and try to escape before colorful gladiator-like "Stalkers" chase them down and kill them. They ain't never seen nothing like Ben Richards, though! Ben, his co-prisoners and revolutionaries Weiss (McIntyre) and Laughlin (Kotto), and the woman he abducted during his first attempt (Alonso) kill off the Stalkers and broadcast the unedited footage of the massacre, which convinces everyone to throw off their hated oppressors!
I really like this movie, but I suspect that's largely nostalgia. There are so many things that don't make any goddamn sense in the movie, not least of which is - if that's unedited footage, why are there so many camera angles, including shots of the helicopter from the outside? And my favorite, if Ben Richards has such regard for life and refuses to harm a helpless human being...how in the fuck did he become a cop in this regime in the first place?
But never mind that. We get to see Arnie battle his way through the Stalkers, from the hockey-samurai Sub-Zero (Tanaka) to the opera-singing Dynamo (Van Lidth) to the chainsaw psycho Buzzsaw (Rethwisch) to, finally, the guy with the flamethrower and the jetpack (Brown), and he's got a stupid line for each of them. The overall effect is this is Baby's First Dystopia - the Network is cartoonishly evil, happy to kill stunt actors in the process of faking Richards' death. Our personification of that evil is Damon Killian (Dawson), the effortlessly charming front man of The Running Man. Meanwhile, we've got the plucky resistance that just needs to obtain one MacGuffin (in this case, the "uplink codes") to get "the Truth" out to "the People." (For extra fun, two of those revolutionaries are Mick Fleetwood playing himself and Dweezil Zappa playing...Steve.)
It's such a perfect encapsulation of 80s thinking, because it takes a story that actually has some nuance and confronts some issues about capitalism and bread and circuses and gives us Arnie yelling "Hey, Light-head! Hey, Christmas Tree!" at a fat dude wearing what appears to be armor made of Lite-Brite.
I am very much looking forward to the new version coming out, not because I don't like this version (I do, but again, nostalgia) but because I'd love to see it follow the source material a little more. (Said source material is a novella by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman.)
My Grade: C+ (it is not a great movie)
Rewatch Value: High (but I love it)
Next up: Taxi Driver
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