Ben Richards (Glen Powell) needs money for his sick kid, so he applies to appear on a Network show, and Network show, to make said money. Just as long as it's not The Running Man. He's very angry, so the producer (Josh Brolin), thinks he'd be great for The Running Man. Richards is desperate enough to accept and quickly learns TV is, gasp, fake!
Not in the sense that people are trying to kill him, or that he can make big bucks if he can stay alive. Those are both real. But in the sense the show lies about how he got to this point, and when he sends in the required daily videos, they fake them to be more incendiary. And at a certain point, the show starts working to keep him alive, at least so long as the ratings are good.
I can't decide if Powell, or maybe it's the movie in general, overplays the "angry" thing. It feels like too much, but the commercials and the other touches Edgar Wright puts in the movie - the clips of the obnoxious "Americanos" show, the videos by "The Apostle" - make the film feel like it's meant to be a satire, Robocop-style. If so, maybe having Ben Richards be a comically angry man, who responds to everything with either acerbic comments or violence, is a good choice. He tried to be a good man, it got him nowhere, now he's pissed off all the time.
Still, the performance puts me in the mind of what Robert Downey Jr. said in Tropic Thunder when watching the play version of Simple Jack. When Powell dials back on the anger throttle, it allows the audience to connect. The moments where Powell is allowed to show Richards' humanity through trying to help people, whether it's offering money to get a sick kid some medicine, or trying to talk a dementia-addled old woman out doing something that will get her killed, those make me root for the guy more than when he's screaming into the floating cameras. Even the bits where he's being funny in the daily videos he's supposed to send in convey his anger in a more relatable way.
Brolin's excellent as this complete scumbag, who is always selling. The conversation near the end, where Powell asks if "they", meaning his wife and daughter, are OK, and Brolin legitimately can't figure out who Powell means until he spells it out. Even though Richards got into this to make money for them, even though that's what Brolin used to convince him. Because it was never anything other than a lever to get what he wanted, a promising contestant. If it didn't work, he'd have tried something else until Richards agreed.
There are some nice scenes or pieces of the film. I think the one I found most disquieting was the part with the two kids who got Laughlin. Them standing on either side of Buddy T (who I kept thinking was a CGI de-aged Ernie Hudson, sorry Colman Domingo!), stone-faced while holding the flamethrowers they used, was unsettling. They're not even happy to be on TV getting cheered for, might as well be telling them it's oatmeal for dinner tonight.
The part where Richards is in the trunk of a car, only aware of how badly things are going via the discussion he can hear and the way he's being bounced around, that was a nice bit. Michael Cera walking Richards through his secret room - 'this is where I make handmade soap, as far as you know' - that was good. I enjoyed a lot of the cat-and-mouse between Richards and the Hunters in general, Richards mostly running for his life, taking out pursuers by sheer dumb luck as much as anything else.
The people he meets along the way were crucial for me to be pulled into the film. They living in the same world as Richards, but they've chosen different approaches to survive than "angrier than Vegeta with a permanent case of hemorrhoids." Whether it's Molie with his business selling TVs that, 'don't watch you back,' or The Apostle sharing the truth about the Network shows through underground tape distribution, or Amelia sneering at the "welfs" who watch The Running Man while insisting she's an open-minded person. Some of them try to address the problem, some put their head down and focus on the ground in front of them, some don't see a problem at all until they see a faked video of themselves leaning out a car window screaming for help.
2 comments:
It's a strange film. I mostly enjoyed it, but it definitely felt like it had been assembled from a bunch of different versions in the editing suite. It had three or four different endings, for example, and they clearly didn't know which one to use, so used them all.
That's a good point about the endings. I think, if they used the "he got blown up in mid-air," bit, then the Apostle's, "or did he?" video, and left it there, that might have worked pretty well.
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