The Glory of the Sport

Arnold Schwarzenegger has had a long and successful career, starting out as a bodybuilder before transitioning into a career in Hollywood with films like Hercules in New York, The Villain, and The Comeback. But it was the pair of Conan movies (both Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer), followed by The Terminator, that truly cemented his place as a massive, muscular, action hero. He was both a charismatic presence on screen, hurling one-liners with ease, and also his own special effect as no one else looked quite like this walking mass of meat.

He’s featured in nearly 50 movies in his career, and that doesn’t even count some quick stints on television, nor his time as the governor of California. And through nearly all of it, he’s carried himself with a similar persona, a certain way of acting that always tells you that you’re watching an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. When the drama is on, he’s in the moment. But the second action comes around, his smile breaks out and he delivers some corny one-liner. It’s the Arnold Schwarzenegger way and, for much of his 1980s and 1990s output, it carried his films. When you saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in a movie, then you knew exactly what you were gonna get: light, cheesy, R-rated action that didn’t require you to engage your brain at all.

If all you knew about The Running Man was that it was an Arnold Schwarzenegger film then, likely, you wouldn’t think anything of it. As a vehicle for the actor, The Running Man doesn’t deviate at all from his standard style of 1980s film. It has plenty of action, it has a lot of cheesy moments, and through it all there’s Arnold delivering that smile with awful one-liners. But if you know it as the dark, dystopian, Stephen KingRising to fame with the release of his first book, Carrie, Stephen King is one of the most prolific, and most successful, American authors (in any genre, not just horror). story (that he wrote as one of his “Bachman Books”), then you might be utterly flabbergasted by this film. This isn’t an adaptation of King’s story, this is just an action film with one shared idea that goes in a completely different direction. It’s less of an adaptation of its source material than, say, Clueless was to Emma.

The year is 2017 and the world has fallen into chaos. Food and water shortages mean that many can’t feed themselves and fewer have the cash to live. Helicopter pilot Captain Ben Richards is sent by the government to monitor and deal with a food protest, but when he reports that the protestors are peaceful and unarmed, the government tells him to shoot them all anyway. He refuses, and is then restrained and arrested by his men. He’s sent to a penal colony to work for the rest of his life while also being framed for the murder of all those peaceful protestors he tried to protect.

Eighteen months later, Ben and two other inmates, William Laughlin (Yaphet Kotto) and Harold Weiss (Marvin J. McIntyre), escape from the penal colony and head back to civilization. Laughlin and Weiss work for the underground, looking to find a way to hack into the government systems and take the oppressive regime down. Ben, though, just wants to meet up with his brother and find a way out of the city. Sadly, his brother was arrested months ago, a detail he learns after he breaks into what he breaks into the apartment he assumed was owned by his brother. Instead he finds Amber Mendez (María Conchita Alonso) there, and after attempting to use her to escape, he’s captured and arrested once more. He’s thrown into the government-run gladiatorial arena game show, The Running Man, and is forced to fight for his life (alongside Laughlin and Weiss, who were also captured) if he wants to find some way to survive.

The thing you have to accept about The Running Man is that it had almost nothing to do with the Stephen King book of the same name. That story was about a man who takes a government deal to participate in a televised hunting game in exchange for food, water, and money to support his family for the rest of their lives. He doesn’t expect to win, and, in fact, the story basically paints it out that he’ll lose regardless, it’s just that he wants to survive long enough to ensure his family gets what was promised. None of that, note, is in the movie.

Instead, this film goes all in as an indictment of game shows and the lust people have for watching violence. The weird thing, when watching the film, is that it feels like it borrows heavily from American Gladiators, this despite the fact the show came out two years later (and may have borrowed some ideas from the movie). You have gladiators… I mean “stalkers” in goofy, spandex costumes, going after the contestants and getting into brawls with them. Sure, American Gladiators wasn’t about injuring or killing contestants, but that’s just the palatable, Saturday morning kids show version of The Running Man. With stalkers named Dynamo, Buzzsaw, and Fireball, is that really that different from Nitro, Ice, and Turbo? Not really.

Naturally, the stalkers here are no match for Arnold, and the movie doesn’t even really pretend otherwise. With a different star in the lead the tension of the film might have been ramped up. Someone like Bruce Willis would have played the character for laughs, sure, but his characters also took damage and slowly wore down over time (I’m thinking of John McClain from Die Hard, for example). But this is Arnold, who was as big and as tough as any of the muscle-bound dudes the movie used as stalkers. His taking on one of these guys feels like a fair fight even before you remember he’s the protagonist so of course he’s going to win. There’s no question of how this will all play out with Arnold in the role.

In fact, because it’s Arnold, you start to realize just how goofy and silly this film really is. These stalkers are supposed to be the best of the best, colorful characters that kill one contestant after another. And yet, at each turn, they’re easily dispatched by Anrold because he doesn’t have to deal with their gimmicks or their stupidity. Professor Sub Zero (no, not that Sub Zero), for example, is a sumo wrestler in hockey gear, who skates around his arena. How is that an effective combat style? It probably isn’t, but it would be more interesting if he was going up against anyone less strong and capable than Arnold. It just doesn’t play.

Although, side note, I would have loved to see them bring back the actor, Professor Toru Tanaka, and the goofy aesthetic of Sub Zero for Batman & Robin, which featured Arnold as Mr. Freeze. That would have been a great casting callback.

With all that said, the film is fun. It has that same laidback, Arnold Schwarzenegger charm that you expect from so many of his vehicles. It’s not challenging or especially thought provoking, but it is amusing to watch and there are plenty of fun moments. The film gets by on its charms and its cheese, letting you bask in the silliness of 1980s action movie culture. A different era, with a different star, would have produced a very different movie based on The Running Man. That might have been a far more accurate, darker, and challenging movie, and it might have even been good, but that wasn’t the film we got. Instead we got this cheese-fest, which is utterly brain dead but, yes, is still a good time.

And it did inspire plenty of other works, like American Gladiators and Super Smash T.V. It might not be the best film, but it’s hard to ignore its many charms. Like so many of Arnold’s works, The Running Man sticks with you just because of its silly fun.