The Running Man: The Team Empire Take

26:39Is he just too invisible, kind of behind the Hollywood-ness of it all? But is that just, I mean, that's a big, you know, film nerd selling point, the Edgar Wrightiness. I don't know if that's a big public at large selling point. Because like Scott Pilgrim was a box office disappointment despite being fucking brilliant. I think, you know, the Edgar Wrightiness historically has not been a big selling point. I think Baby Driver is still his biggest film, right? That's correct, yeah. Which is mad to me, actually. Maybe you did just need a bigger name. Ansel Elgort? I mean, you know, I think Glenn Powell is definitely a bigger name than Anselm Elgort.

27:19I think maybe it's partly the marketing. I thought the trailers were good. I didn't love the posters, but they were around this country, certainly. They were present on all the buses and everything, you know.

27:30Chris Hewitt:There was a really good poster that came out about two weeks before it opened, which I felt was a bit more dynamic than the ones that had been going out there, which were largely headshots. And this one actually had Ben Richards, Glenn Powell running on the poster. and just kind of exploding out of the background. That's right, yeah, that's a cool one. And I wonder if maybe that was just a little bit too little too late in terms of getting bums and seeds or getting that sort of, I want to see, I need to see this. But I mean, also, I cannot stress enough, I mean, Predator is Predator. People know the name Predator even if they don't know Predator.

28:01And while I personally had forgotten every detail of Now You See Me, at least the last one came out in the last 15 years. The Running Man is a nearly 40-year-old film that even we as Schwarzenegger fans would probably put outside his top five. Yeah, definitely. Right? So there's no kind of built-in affection for that. That's not, you know, top 10 Stephen King either. Might be top 10 Richard Backman, but that's an easier chart to get to place on.

28:31Chris Hewitt:By dint of not being 10 Richard Backman. Exactly. But, you know, I think it is starting from a place further back than maybe we as hardcore cinema nuts and action fans maybe understood. Who would be the name that would give bums on seats? If Glenn Powell, a star on the rise, isn't going to do it? I mean, I don't know that there are many stars that do put bums on seats these days. I feel like people come out for the IP, as disgusting as it sounds for me to say that phrase. But there are very few movie stars who translate to box office. I mean, even Tom Cruise has flops, you know, like, I don't know.

29:11And I don't think Glenn Powell is a bankable movie star. I don't think this disproves the grand unifying theory of Glenn Powell. I think, like, you know, anyone but you, him and Sidney Sweeney, that turned into a massive, like, sleeper hit. The question might be what people want to see him do. Because the old model was you become a movie star making action movies. and I wonder if the new model is something else because I don't know that... Maybe people just want to see him wearing shorts and flirting, you know, or a white t-shirt and jeans and a cowboy hat and flirting. Like, maybe people just want to watch him flirt.

29:53Chris Hewitt:Helen, you see him in a towel. I know you do, but you don't see him flirting. Not flirtatiously. I don't know, there's a couple of glances between him and some of the hunters that you could interpret very generously. I think if anything, what it gives me hope for with Glenn Powell is that he might actually be a pretty good actor because I found him absolutely charmless in this film. And exactly what you've been saying about Richards as a character, he's really angry. He's kind of unpleasant. I found him really difficult to root for. and I think from not knowing the source material that well I think maybe I assumed that was a fault with the film but actually maybe that is just they've sounded off his rough edges yeah oh they have believe me in the book well yeah he wasn't racist in this no he wasn't racist but no I reread the book I've read it a couple of times but I reread it when I was going on set just to get a sense of it because I had a feeling that they would go faithful I didn't realize how faithful apart from the end.

31:02Chris Hewitt:It's very faithful. We'll get into that in a second. But I was kind of really taken aback by how horrible Richards is in the book. He's a really tough character to root for. But King's brilliance, I think, is that he puts him in a situation where you have no choice but to root for him. And he doesn't become likable as the book goes on. And in actual fact, it makes the ending of the book make sense. So let's talk about the ending of the book and then the ending of the film as well. I do want to just say one more thing about his likability before we sort of talk about the ending because I do think it's a real thing.

31:42Like I liked him in the sense that I very much understood the motivation. I thought that worked. Your child is sick. You do what you can. And he does have a plan going into the TV center, which is not the running man. He has a plan to do literally any other game show and win some money. and you know I thought I thought the the thought process and the kind of setup of why he would agree to do this was was pretty well sketched out you know you can see that there's there's an amount there's an element of male ego there's there definitely is the sort of thought that maybe I can actually be like just because fuck you and I'm going to show you that I'm going to I'm going to annoy you by proving you right and actually winning this um but also So I think, you know, you're probably right that this is the way to provide for my family.

32:28So I think I liked that. I thought all that was well set up. I think the problem when he goes on the run is really that he just doesn't have enough. He doesn't have enough sounding boards to really be interesting against, you know, with the exception of that brief period with a family. He's kind of on his own and just talking to the TV a lot of the time. And some of the stuff he does is, again, not likable. Hiding out in a posh hotel, like stupid. Like, come on. Very, very stupid. Also, standing right by the open window, fully lit by the streetlights outside.

33:03Chris Hewitt:I mean, he doesn't behave as stupidly as Martin Harel-Hee's character, who just wanders around in broad daylight for two days until he gets his ticket punched. Until he gets, absolutely. I mean, he does some flirting, to be fair. He does, he does. Yeah, he is very flirtatious. But like, that would have been, if you wanted to lean into the Glenn Powell-iness of it all, You should have genuinely had him just going from woman to woman, being shielded from the hunters. That would have been quite an amusing way of approaching it. Anyway, the point is, I think he's definitely trying to tone down the charisma and dial up the anger beyond anything we've ever seen from him.

33:43And I don't think it is necessarily natural to him as an actor. There are actors who portray anger magnificently. I don't think he's one of those guys who almost visibly has it bubbling under at all times but I thought he did a decent job of faking it

33:59Chris Hewitt:Yeah, it's interesting that they didn't I mean, there are moments in this where you do see flashes of the Powell charm come through but that decision to have him be as angry as he is from the off I think you're right it doesn't really give him a lot of leeway it doesn't give him a lot of room to move Lee Paceway Lee Paceway Here we go, there's the pacemakers going again those hearts are beating faster now I'm going to make t-shirts we are the pacemakers and yeah perhaps he doesn't have enough room to grow I didn't mind that he didn't have sounding boards we'll talk about the Michael Cera sequence in a few minutes obviously he does hitch up with that family as you said earlier on that stuff's all very very important but I quite like the scenes where he's on his own trying to be resourceful and inventive and figure things out and yes, you know, I would probably go to a posh hotel and stay there for a couple of days.

34:54What I wouldn't do is take all my clothes off

34:57Chris Hewitt:and go to sleep on the bed in my tidy whities because you don't know when the hunters are going to turn up and you don't be running barefoot across rooftops because that's a situation that will turn your tidy whities to tidy brownies pretty damn quickly. That's all I'm going to say on that one. But anyway, the ending. Shall we talk about the ending? Yeah. All right, so have you guys read the book? I read the book, I think, as a teenager. I barely remember it, but I do remember the ending being quite dark. Quite dark. Quite dark is an understatement. So the ending of the book, it's pretty much as it is up until the last 10 minutes or so.

35:41Chris Hewitt:So everything with Amelia Jones's character, everything they get on the plane, there's a bit of business with the Hunters I don't remember the bit of business with McCone being the first contestant on the Running Man who is then turned into a Hunter I don't think that's in the book that made sense to me that's a nice improvement on King Hunger Games-y isn't it? I guess it is although it does make the Mask again interesting doesn't it because then maybe we could have seen him on the game like a clip of him on the game and then people would have gone, oh, that's Lee Pace. The pacemakers would have been thumping away, but yeah, squealing away.

36:20Chris Hewitt:But that might have been a nice little setup. That makes sense. Okay, so that's new. What's also new is how this film ends because the book ends with Richards basically killing himself and everyone involved with the running man by piloting his plane into the building, the network building. I wonder why they didn't do that in 2025. I don't know. Yeah, baffling. It's a strange one. I think, okay, so my issue with the ending was not primarily that, even though I didn't love that idea. I think I wanted a little bit more ambiguity, maybe in how that then played out afterwards, because I think there was ambiguity to a certain point.

37:13When you have the ending and then you have the conspiracy theory YouTuber going, no, he survives. And then you have the shadowy figure who looks like him approaching Killian. You're like, ha-ha, that's clever. Yeah, did he die or didn't he? Is he now the unseen everyman who is all rebels against this unjust system? And then you have him turning up to his wife and baby, which feels much more, oh, no, he really did survive. He is now the leader of the resistance, and this is all real, and the conspiracy theorists are right, which is always a bad plan in movies when you say conspiracy theorists are right.

37:48It's just not a good look. Anyway, so I feel like you could have left it before making it explicit that, yes, he survived and they survived and everything is fine.

37:59Chris Hewitt:I would have maybe stopped it just before that. I don't know that audiences would have been satisfied with that. No, and I probably would have complained about that being unsatisfying as well. But I think from a narrative point of view, I think it would have been more in keeping with the tone of the rest of the film. And I think the film as a whole might have felt more coherent as a result. But otherwise, how does the film end? I mean, I would have quite liked like a sort of Dark Knight Rises, Michael Caine just sort of raising a glass to him and an Italian... Which is Michael Caine, showing up in this movie.

38:24Chris Hewitt:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd have been on board with that. Yeah, like he's just sitting in an Italian town square and then suddenly he sees him and he's just like, oh, hello. because that is an actor who could do anger out of nowhere to be clear I'm just saying leave out the bit with the family but you could still have him you could still have the conspiracy theory bit and you could still have him approaching Killian as the shadow in the studio and that would be unending but you didn't want the explicit you didn't want to end on Glenn Powell's face so to speak so to speak well and the little kind of salute where he sort of puts his hand up to his chest which I think he'd done earlier to the wife before he actually goes off to apply for one of the shows it felt for me and as a grumpy old cynic who loves a nihilistic ending to a movie it felt too neat and a little bit too schmaltzy which tonally didn't work with the rest of the film and kind of confirmed in that final moment for me what i'd kind of been feeling throughout the whole film which was it was tonally all over the place and I was finding it difficult to engage with what I was supposed to be feeling and when it kind of ended on on that slightly schmaltzy moment I was like oh dear um I would have definitely ended it with uh just him shooting Josh Brolin in the face wow okay Josh Brolin's character yeah yes yes no I do know what you mean about it I do think that that sort of reunion felt a little bit clumsy but I did like that it ended with the people rising up.

40:04You know, there's this theme running through the movie that Ben Richards is kind of like a reluctant revolutionary and he sort of finally takes this mantle at the end and the fact that the Running Man studio, there's suddenly Molotov cocktails there for some reason that we've managed to get those through security. Yeah, how bad is security? I mean, you know. They don't have scanners for Molotovs, I guess. Apparently. But that was fun. That felt thematically consistent, and it was sort of like what the film seemed to be building towards, which is this sort of popular uprising is finally taking place, and Ben Richards is inspiring it.

40:41Yeah. And I like that. And that's something the book doesn't really have. I mean, it has this sort of sense of dissatisfaction with society and under an autocratic capitalist overture. But yeah, to have that, there's sort of the people uprising as opposed to just one bloke smashing his plane into a building. That seemed like a nice touch.

41:08Chris Hewitt:I like how it ends. I like the bit with business with Killian. I like that Bobby T, the Coleman Domingo character, actually has a bit of agency as well and stands up for himself. And yes, he's bad and terrible. and in the great uprising will ultimately be put up against a wall as they all will and deservedly so. But, you know, all the people involved with The Running Man down to the runners. Do they have runners in The Running Man? Anyway. Would you accept a job as a runner on The Running Man? I would be very wary of looking at the small... It's like, what am I doing here? Oh, by the way, when I was in the audience of Deal and Roe Deal, they allowed Molotov cocktails.

41:50Chris Hewitt:They do. Yeah. We stand corrected. Just in case the banker gets ideas. What about Countdown? Do you think Countdown, they wouldn't do? No, no, not in the days of Richard Whiteley, that's for sure, or Carol Forderman. Get you a lovely high score though, wouldn't it? Yeah, would do. I'll have two from the top, please, Carol, and she's picking up Molotov cocktails. That'd be amazing. Anyway, the ending, I really like the ending. I think all the stuff with Killian, all the stuff with Bobby T standing up to Killian and kind of getting his own triumph over Killian. It's just nice to see rich, overprivileged wankers get their comeuppance.

42:22Chris Hewitt:And Brolin, I think, is terrific in this. He's not in it a lot. And the decision to be very faithful to the book means that we're tethered to Richard's point of view throughout. Which means that people like Jamie Lawson as Richard's wife, Sheila, maybe don't get to showcase themselves as much as they would in an adaptation which is cutting back and forth between. POVs constantly. So these people have very, very limited amounts of screen time. But Brolin's performance in this I think is smarminess personified. When I think of his performance in this I think of him primarily as teeth. I think he's just this wide shark's smile.

43:09Chris Hewitt:He's a very, very seductive man. He's clearly a prick. And I like that he got what was coming to him. I agree. pretty aggressively as well at the end. Yeah, no qualms at all about the casting of either Killian or Coleman Domingo. What's his character name? Bobby T. Bobby T. Bobby T. I thought he was great. I thought it was one of the best things in it. I also loved Katie O 'Brien. I thought she was amazing. The only thing I wanted was a little bit more set up of that sort of nihilism from her than I felt like we got in the intro. You know, when they're going through kind of training together, I didn't feel like that sort of facet of her character was really established that we saw there were told rather than shown.

43:50Agreed. And you just get that, well, there are three types of contestants line. It's like, okay, well, I guess she's this one. Yeah. And so I could just, again, one more beat for her would have been great. But she's so good. She just needs more leading roles. I mean, yeah.

44:03Chris Hewitt:I guess the very fact of applying for The Running Man, because that is something she was actively doing, and the Martin Hurley character, whose name I have forgotten, was just an idiot who didn't seem to grasp the implications of being on The Running Man at all when he gets on The Running Man he's like hey we're on The Running Man you're going to be dead you're dead now you're dead Richard is smarter than that he doesn't want to be in The Running Man he's given the big sell by Cillian to get on it but Laughlin is I think someone who has a fuck it fuck them all let's go out burning which of course ironically she does attitude.

44:44Chris Hewitt:So she wants to actively be on the running man to go out in style and leave, hopefully, a good-looking corpse. Although she doesn't. Alas, not the case. But do you know what I mean? I just wanted one more moment of that. I agree. Yeah, that's fair. And I think overall, Becky's kind of right about it could have been just a little bit shorter, tighter. But look, I enjoyed... You're talking about my butt again. I am talking about your butt again. But I enjoyed those performances certainly I thought they were fun and the cutaways kind of back to their parallel experiences were pretty effective. The one bit that didn't really work for me was the Americanos the sort of soap that he's watching.

45:26Chris Hewitt:Yeah. I didn't I don't understand where that was going. I mean I get that oh yes people watch shows like the Cardassians haha but it didn't seem to have any Cardassians is of course Star Trek you mean the Cardassians. I do. I always get those I genuinely get those mixed up. the Kardashians are the sexy ones on DS9 and the Kardashians are the sexy ones here on planet Earth the Kardashians are the sexiest ones yeah there we go but yeah I just I didn't like there was no kind of I thought there was going to be some kind of payoff for that I thought there was going to be some kind of like parallel like are they watching The Running Man 2 and they start you know commenting on his adventures do you know what I mean I thought there was going to be something and maybe there was and it got cut because you know it's everything has to be fitted into these movies but I don't know I just thought there would be something else to that rather than just, oh, look at rich women being awful.

46:14Yeah, maybe it could have done a bit of punching up. But I did enjoy them whenever they were on. And also I enjoyed finding out later that it was Emma Ciddy and Cat Cohen. I don't know if you know these people. Yeah, Cat Cohen. Cat Cohen is amazing. She has a really good special on Netflix. She does. I saw her at the Edinburgh Fringe this year. She was phenomenal. Amazing. She's like a sort of burlesque comedian, isn't she? Yeah, kind of. She does sort of songs and sort of poetry, but she's just very... She's a perfect actress to play a character like this, because, and even though she doesn't get a huge amount of lines to kind of get this across, but if you know anything about her as a comedian, she kind of plays up to this very kind of hyper-feminine, sort of like, I'm a little baby girl who needs looking after, but she absolutely isn't that.

47:07You know, she's extremely smart and capable and amazing. So I thought that the casting for that was very astute. And Emma City, Series 18 of Taskmaster.

47:18Chris Hewitt:Yes. Now, last week's regular podcast question was the best film starring someone from Taskmaster UK. Is The Running Man a contender? John, based on Emma City's... It's in there. It's in there. It's in the running. Yep. Man. Hey. Hey. there we go alright so let's talk very very quickly because we're going to wrap this bad boy up about some of the other sequences and performances anything that has kind of slipped us by so far I think Michael Cera yes Home Alone that whole sequence yes John fucking loves it yes finally finally a Home Alone sequence worthy of the name always put a Home Alone in your movie that's just be the golden rule for every filmmaker I love that sequence the Booby Traps it's great fun no Anyone?

48:05No, I actually really enjoyed that. It was so incongruous, and I feel like it could have been, if anything, played up more. I mean, I know that his... And I've had arguments. I think, did we have an argument with James about this? About him finally pressing the alarm and calling the police? Makes no sense. And of course, logically, strategically, he is 100 % right. It makes absolutely no sense. It makes less than no sense. However, if you are a slightly mad person, who has a grudge against the local police and is dying to see how well all of your Home Alone traps work, then there is a certain poetry to it.

48:46Imagine if you've built all these Home Alone traps and then you're just sitting, waiting to use them. That must be so frustrating. I got it. And also, he's kind of pitched as a sort of anarchist, isn't he? He's sort of like, he is a fuck the system, I don't give a shit kind of character. I enjoyed him a lot. It's fun to see him working with Edgar as well. Scott Pilgrim. Very different Scott Pilgrim character.

49:12Chris Hewitt:I think he's really good. I've had conversations with people who thought he wasn't that great in the film. I don't want to name names, but it rhymes with names. Work it out. Names Nier. It rhymes with names Nier. But I thought he was really good in this. And I love that bit where the goons are coming into the house and it was given away in the trailer, but he's electrified the floor and as he's pumping the water pistol there's a look in his face that is just pure joy. It's just like, this is what I've dreamed of for years. And then of course he exits stage left. When I was on set in Bulgaria watching this sequence where Glenn Powell, not in the towel this time, jumps off a bridge and they did it for real about 10 or 11 times.

49:54Chris Hewitt:That was a really, really fun sequence to watch but Michael Cera's corpse was in the cheap under a tarpaulin. So you could go over, lift up the tarpaulin and there would be a very realistic, lifelike, dead Michael Cera with a bullet wound in his forehead. I knew it was going to end well for Elton. It doesn't in the book. But I was just like, what's that like for an actor? Being confronted with your own dead self. He wasn't on set, but that must be so strange. Existential angst all over the place. It really must be. and another thing that happened on set was it leaves and I was given a tour of Elton's house with all the booby traps rigged up and it was a live set with live not live rounds but live explosives that had been squibs and stuff so you were told to be very very careful turn your phone off before you walk on this you do not want to be the person who fucks up I don't think we were in danger at any point but you don't want to be the person who like oh this is going to be very difficult to reset if I accidentally set off these squibs and everything goes kaboom this is going to be hard to sort out and what other sets was I on I was on the big YVA set which Marcus Rowland the production designer had built and it was three stories and it was incredibly attention to detail each room was finished entirely had little things things you just wouldn't see loads of Stephen King in jokes Fendi machines it actually kind of worked and yeah it was just it was really really impressive build I saw the plane being built.

51:28Chris Hewitt:I got to walk on the plane for a little bit. I didn't check whether I had six toilets or only four. To tell you the truth, I've lost track in all this excitement. But it was, yeah, it was a very, very impressive visual point of view. The story of his survival only really makes sense if at some point after that question, after getting that question wrong, if you remember, on the game show, he had gone away and sort of Googled that plane and looked it up and found, oh, there's a pilot escape hatch. I think Bing is the prevalent search engine in this world. Oh, God, it really is. Ben Richards has to ask Cheeves to stay alive.

52:05Chris Hewitt:Yeah, absolutely. How would he know that there was the escape hatch on that plane? Yeah, that's never been established. And also, he's wounded quite badly at that point. Maybe he's just looking around. Yeah, he was wounded. He got better, like Chevalier. Yeah, he landed on the escape hatch. The escape pod landed somewhere. he crawled out putting his intestines back into his body sure bit of super glue bit of super glue yep totally fine totally fine yeah can I also say might as well say this right now I've seen the phrase Powell in a towel being used a lot recently in social media can I just call attention to the fact I was the first person to say that that phrase in Empire Magazine a couple months ago all royalties should be going to me no one else would have thought of it either no I have absolutely no doubt about that Chris yeah yeah yeah smacks of Hewitt that does it does smack of Hewitt doesn't it much like his buttocks there we go we're back to the butt devil and on that note unless there's anything else you want to say anything you've been itching to get off your chest or indeed buttocks about this movie The Running Man I think we're done are we done?

53:13I will keep my buttocks covered thank you so much

53:16Chris Hewitt:goodness makes a change Helen makes a change that is it for our The Running Man spoiler special don't forget the Edgar Wright interview which is really interesting lots of insight on things we talked about things we haven't talked about that'll be out in a week or so as will the Dan Trachtenberg Predator Badlands spoiler special as will the Ruben Fleischer Now You See Me Now You Don't spoiler special interview as will the John M. Chu Wicked For Good spoiler special interview oh my god oh who else Guillermo the Toro and Frankenstein And oh my God, our cup overfloweth. But anyway, thank you for subscribing as ever.

53:54Chris Hewitt:If you want to come and see us live for episode 700, Friday, January 9th at King's Place London, you had best be quick because we are down to the last couple of rows of seats, folks. They're going fast. So kingsplace.co.uk if you want to come and see us. And in the meantime, all that remains is to say goodbye to my three colleagues of such a lethal cunning. goodbye Becky Dark goodbye goodbye John Ugent goodbye goodbye Helen O 'Hara toodaloo and it's goodbye for me I'm off to crash the set of Speed the Wheel the Sean Hayes quiz show that we see in The Running Man I'm going to bring a Molotov cocktail get my bum out see what happens perfect classic Monday night thanks for listening see you next time bye bye

54:47Thank you.