In the midst of Trump’s America, Hollywood has rediscovered the dystopian power of Stephen King’s Bachman novels. While King has used the Bachman pseudonym sporadically throughout his career, the four classic Bachman novels – Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man – all date from the five year period between 1977 and 1982, which coincides with the golden era of King’s career. Both The Long Walk and The Running Man were adapted in 2025 and neither adaptation is a total success, largely because neither film is as radical as King’s own vision. Both texts also laid the foundation for the kind of dystopian fiction we see in The Hunger Games, so both films also play as a kind of preface to The Hunger Games (The Long Walk was actually directed by Francis Lawrence, who directed all but the first film in The Hunger Games franchise). Yet The Hunger Games is arguably too futuristic for the present moment – we need a dystopia embedded in the here and now, in a recognisable version of the present, and that is what these Bachman adaptations provide.

Already adapted once in 1987, The Running Man unfolds in a United States run by a fascist entertainment known as “the Network,” an entertainment conglomerate that pervades every facet of society. When protagonist Ben Richards, played by Glen Powell, is laid off from a factory job, and unable to procure medicine for his daughter after being blacklisted for union activism, he decides to raise money using the only remaining avenue: enlisting for one of the many game shows that function as the Network’s main mechanism of control. As with The Long Walk, King evokes an America structured around an enormous gulf between wealth and poverty that can only be brinked through acts of spectatorial brinksmanship. After being profiled by the Network, Richards is enlisted in “The Running Man,” the apex of these game shows, which has a disarmingly simple premise: Richards has to stay alive for thirty days. He can go anywhere, but has to post a physical message each day, and accrues money for each day he survives, while everyone in America is enjoined to hunt him down. “Merely surviving a single week” puts him in the “top one percent of global wealth,” in what producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) and host Bobby Thompson (Colman Domingo) celebrate as “a return to the barbarism of the Roman Colosseum.” Resistance seems futile, because resistance is part of the spectacle – as in the early Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits,” Richards’ history of insubordination makes him an ideal contender, with producer Dan advising him not to think too much before addressing the crowd on the eve before the game begins: “You’ve got one job out there – you’re feeling violent, angry and aggrieved.” Later, Richards discovers he can be caught at any time (there are DNA detectors in most streetlights) and is only permitted to stay alive insofar as his “rebellion” incites ratings.

To some extent, Edgar Wright draws on the 1987 adaptation, pairing the bluntness and frankness of a B-movie with the muscular maximalism of an 80s action film; Dan admits that Richards is “quantifiably the angriest man to ever audition for one of our shows.” Up to a point, this works well to converge real and virtual realms, everyday life and strategic gameplay. Yet it also makes the film feel like watching someone else gaming – hyper-visceral and yet oddly uninvolving. It’s not hard to see why Wright’s hyper-kinetic style seemed like a good match after Baby Driver, since both films are basically a single mobile trajectory. But the surfeit of energy in The Running Man doesn’t leave much space for tension, often resulting in action without suspense. At some level, that’s the result of King’s world, which is so saturated with screens and interfaces that it barely leaves any room for the spatiality and temporality needed for suspense. Richards is perpetually watching his pursuit in real time and always on the verge of being eclipsed by his own media image. In one scene he watches a crack squad of assassins as they make their way into the hotel where he is hiding and then prepare to knock down his door – all on the television in his room. Sometimes Wright tries to accommodate this hyperreality by resorting to a music video aesthetic but it doesn’t come together in the same way as Baby Driver, partly because this hypermediated world breaks down diegetic and non-diegetic noise, making it hard to envisage the precise personally curated soundtrack of Ansel Elgort’s protagonist; the days of interfacing through a single device are long gone. I think the best way for Wright to have addressed this bind of a world that is all surface would have been to focus more on the architecture of the game itself, but we don’t find out all that much except that Richards needs to emerge from the virtual gamified realm for a physical mail drop every 24 hours, a contrast that hits much harder now than when King published his novel, reminding me of the strangeness of the early days of Netflix, when you returned DVDs through the post.

The Running Man also suffers from being a certain kind of British take on the United States. Wright is clearly trying to mirror the inane anarchic energy of MAGAmerica here – a Kardashian-esque reality series called “The Americanos” percolates throughout the narrative, featuring a tantalising glimpse of Debi Mazar as a Kim surrogate. But the whole aesthetic is a bit too cartoonish; there’s nothing remotely chilling, for example, about the footage of the first running man in Richards’ squad of three being killed: even the victim himself seems to find it amusing. Whether Richards is clinging naked, Tarzan-like, to the side of the building, or lighting nudie magazines for an Indiana-Jones-styled torch, the tone is too farcical, too redolent of, say, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’s smug vision of “America.” To be sure, Trump’s America is also an “America,” but the film isn’t commensurate to it, perhaps because Wright tries to ironise America in the same way that he ironises genre in the Cornetto Trilogy. But Trump’s America is beyond irony, something that the final seasons of Veep (another Brit’s version on the United States) handled much better in their shift from satire to nihilism as the series’ vision of proto-Trumpian venality started to overlap historically with the first term of the emergent Trump admistration.

I also found myself wondering whether The Running Man represents the limits of Powell’s range. To be fair, he’s not given much to work with – when he’s not showing off his abs or jawline, he’s consigned to repeating the same line over and over about protecting his family. Still, there’s a big contrast with Michael Cera, who appears in the third act as Elton Parrakis, a rebel against the Network, and who immediately brings the zany energy that the film needs, delivering a slightly unhinged monologue in which you can truly hear King’s voice for the first time before offering Richards one of his vast store of Monster energy drinks. Cera’s arc also compensates for the flat textures of the film by bringing us back to King’s perennial muse: rural Maine. We learn that Elton’s father was a police officer in Derry, Maine, who protested against the Network’s privatisation of law and order by retiring and running a hot dog cart, which Elton now keeps in his sprawling mansion as a reminder of the textures of the old world. Elton’s narrative also ushers in one of the eeriest visual tableaux of the film: Liberty Springs, a gated neighborhood on the outskirts of Derry, once touted as “Maine’s newest premium community,” but now abandoned and decaying. It’s not hard to see in this failed gated community a reflection of the film’s own failure to contain the distinctive atmospherics of King’s Maine, and sure enough Cera departs almost as soon as he arrives.

All of that paves the way for a pretty weak third act that’s almost indistinguishable from a mid-tier Black Mirror episode. The constant convergence of life and spectacle gets a bit boring, especially when accompanied by continuous expositional voiceover, while the ending doesn’t really make any sense, opting for grandstanding in lieu of denouement – and even that grandstanding is little more than “we live in a society.” The ending also feels dated. After Richards apparently dies on live television, in the closing stages of the game, the film ends with a pirate television station arguing that he is still alive. This recourse to media in place of resolution can be quite powerful – for example, in the image management that occurs during the closing credits of William Eubank’s Underwater. But here the “alternative broadcast” feels like culture jamming, a futuristic prospect when King wrote the book but utterly old-fashioned and implausible now. Plus, the pirate station’s case is so brief, and so flimsy, that it ultimately feels like it’s just plastering over a non-ending.  

All in all, then, The Running Man is one of the weakest King adaptations of recent years, despite the impressive pedigree attached to it. For me, its eeriest and most enduring element was its glimpse of how how AI might mediate the public sphere and how deepfaking might be using to manufacture consensus in years to come. Towards the end of the film, Richards simply asks Dan, “Why don’t you just fake the show?” and Dan responds, “Believe me, we’ve tried, but humans provide an unpredictable spark…audiences love these happy accidents.” In this dystopia, AI has gone as far as it can, meaning that “unpredictable” behaviours have become a precious commodity, and “happy accidents” have become critical ratings generators. It’s a creepy vision of a fully technocratic world in which human idiosyncrasy or fallibility has been utterly contained by fascist spectacle. And yet long stretches of The Running Man also play like AI slop, which makes it pretty interminable at over two hours, a reminder of just how elusive these Bachman books are to truly adapt.