Edgar Wright’s remake of The Running Man may not be perfect, but leading man Glen Powell sure is

Photo courtesy Paramount

Since the beginning of Glen Powell’s ascendancy—which, in my eyes, really began in 2016 with Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!—it feels like he’s been on the hunt for a movie star persona. He’s come close, from entering the good graces of Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick to exhibiting star-power leadership on Twisters, generating behind-the-scenes rumors on Anyone But You and creating a showcase for himself in Linklater’s Hit Man.

Powell’s been great in those movies, even better than some of those projects deserve. But it’s never been quite enough to tell us who this guy is as a star, the consistent vibe he’s going to bring beyond just getting bigger and bigger roles. It’s clear Powell wants to be Cruise or Brad Pitt-level. But what might that look like?

The Running Man has the answer, and it’s pretty damn compelling.

Regardless of how you feel about Edgar Wright’s Stephen King adaptation as a film, Powell’s ability to command every single scene he’s in is undeniable.

In the past, Powell was affable, charming, sometimes even goofy. This time, he’s intense, angry, physical, and funny. He’s a movie star, given a big enough canvas to finally go as big and magnetic as he’s wanted to this whole time.

Powell is the glue of Wright’s adaptation, which walks a tenuous line between its identities as a remake of the 1987 Paul Michael Glaser-directed Running Man and a more faithful rendering of Stephen King’s 1982 novel. Powell is Ben Richards, an unemployed working-class guy stuck in the slums of a dystopian city where hard-up folks can win money by competing on TV game shows run by rich sadists. Ben’s baby daughter is seriously ill, so he joins the rabble to audition for whatever show will have him.

Ben is picked for “The Running Man,” in which contestants are let loose to evade a crew of hit men (led by Lee Pace’s masked assassin McCone) for as long as possible. They earn more money the longer they stay alive, with a bonus for every hit man they kill in the process. Ben is in incredible shape and has a fierce will to live, so he quickly becomes the final runner, to the delight of ratings-obsessed producer Dan Killian (a toothy Josh Brolin). Along the way, Ben’s hatred of authority makes him an underground resistance icon.

Wright’s movie attempts to maintain the visuals of Glaser’s film and the perspective of King’s novel. Fans of Andy Muschietti’s IT movies and the IT: Welcome to Derry prequel series will appreciate that Wright’s The Running Man is squarely set in the King-verse. Colman Domingo fits the aesthetic of the 1987 film as bombastic TV presenter Bobby T, surrounded by a phalanx of swimsuit-wearing women with blowouts as he spouts jingoistic catchphrases through a Cheshire Cat grin.

Other elements, like Michael Cera’s volatile anarchist, and Daniel Ezra and Angelo Gray as a pair of street-smart punks feel distinctly Wright-flavored.

That dual fealty is almost the movie’s undoing. The Running Man is plenty fun as a solid actioner with a bitter axe to grind about oligarchy and mass media corruption. Tonally however, it’s not sure which direction to favor: the flashy sleaze of the original movie or the dark, ceaseless fury of King’s novel. Glaser’s movie exuded “Paul Verhoeven-for-dummies” vibes, and it’s hard not to wish Wright (who’s no dummy) and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World co-writer Michael Bacall had more of Verhoeven’s subtle command of satire to go along with those propagandistic visuals.

This Running Man doesn’t short on entertainment, but the heavier-handed its themes get, the less effective it becomes.

Keeping the whole thing from teetering into messy disaster is Powell, who commits equally to the Arnie-esque manic action (disarmingly symmetrical shit-eating grin and all) and the moral hero’s journey aspects, even when they feel particularly thudding. The guy rappels from the window of a flophouse wearing nothing but a towel, then later in the same scene jumps into a sewer and crows into the camera, middle finger flipped up. You get the feeling that if you followed him into Hell, you’d witness the fight of a lifetime and have a grand old time doing it.

This should be the movie that announces Powell’s graduation from leading man material to the genuine article. It’s hard to imagine what else he’d have to do to get there.