The Running Man is Awful '80s Cheese

What with the movie being set in the year 2017, and me not having seen it since it was in theaters 30 years ago (fuck you, @mburtonk and @TheBurgerKing), I figured I'd give it a rewatch. I can remember thinking that the movie was a light, frothy souffle when it came out. In rewatching it, however, it's pretty clear that it's pond scum.

Ignoring the shit they got wrong (nobody in the film has a cellphone, let alone a smartphone, for example), it's still a hideously bad movie. Arnold's best line in the film? Him saying "I'll be back." Which doesn't even originate with this movie! The film tries to be a cross between Mad Max, The Most Dangerous Game, and Network, while managing to fail spectacularly at all of them. Freakin' Duran Duran's "Wild Boys" music video had a more coherent vision of a post-apocalyptic future than this did. (And better special effects.)

Perhaps one of the most annoying things about the film is that every time Arnold had a line, it seemed as if the camera did a jump cut to focus clearly on Arnold's face as he emotionalessly. spoke. his. lines. as. if. he. was. unfamiliar. with. the. English. language. and. was. reading. his. lines. phonetically. off. cue. cards. Richard Dawson simply did his "Family Feud" routine and he was goddamned Philip Seymour Hoffman by comparison. Seriously, Dawson clearly took the job because he knew it would be an easy paycheck for him. There's no growth or depth to his character through the entire film.

Surprisingly, Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa both appear in the film. Mick's buried in makeup, so the only way you can know it's him is by his accent. Dweezil wear's a red beret in the movie. As does Jim Brown and Jesse Ventura.

Maria Conchita Alonso is some lovely eye candy (though your very stereotypical fiery tempered Latina), but she fails to get nude in this movie (unlike other films she's done), so not worth it to watch it for her. And the soundtrack is wretched. Cheap, Casio keyboard style music, and when you hear it playing Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, you'll want to go all Robert Duvall on their asses for using it.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the movie was directed by Paul Michael Glaser, AKA 'Starsky' of "Starsky and Hutch" fame.

Running Man was set in 2019 in the movie and 2025 in the book, and neither are post apocalyptic, just set in authoritarian dystopias. The book was some of Stephen King's worst work, and for an 80's Arnold film, I agree it wasn't the best, but I do love the set pieces.

I didn't even like it when it was new but I think it was early 1990's cheese and not 1980's cheese. I am far to lazy to bother looking it up though.

The opening scenes of the film, where Arnie refused to shoot civilians were set in 2017, but the bulk of the film does take place in 2019, as you said. And the opening crawl makes it sound like a post-apocalyptic world, with only small pockets of civilization ruled by various groups, though from what we see in the movie, it looks like just an authoritarian society that's running the whole country, and not just isolated parts of it.

No offense.

But you expected "growth or depth of character" in an Arnold Schwartzneggar movie??

Almost without exception people go to Arnold Schwartzneggar movies hoping to see him kill lots of 'baddies", very cool explosions, and as a bonus some snappy one liners from Arnold.

I didn't expect to see him make a dramatic change, but some shift. You know, how like Mel Gibson gives up smoking at the end of one of the Lethal Weapon movies. It shows that his character has changed, even if it isn't a huge shift in him at all. We didn't even get any snappy one-liners from Arnie in this movie. Oh, sure, when someone asks Arnie what happened to a guy Arnie sawed in half, Arnie replies with, "He had to split." Not exactly a knee-slapper of a line. Especially when it sounded like Arnie was delivering it through a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

This is one of dozens (hundreds?) of movies that "everybody" has seen but I haven't.

It looked like a bad idea to me at the time and I can't imagine it getting better with age.


Point of order: As I pointed out, I haven't seen the flick, but cameras don't cut.

It doesn't. However, there's some fun to be had in noticing that there are giant flat screen TVs all over the place, showing the game show, but the folks in the control booth and the computer hackers are all staring at CRT monitors. (Oh, and the computer graphics are awful. Some of them are definitely 8-bit.)

Ever read a film script? The phrase "CAMERA CUTS TO" is a common direction given in them.

Cutting is an edit transition, not a camera move.

Tell that to scrip writers.

They're scribblers not operators.

Uh, huh. You expect clarity and accuracy from an industry which has a position called "Best Boy"? Gotta wonder if they didn't give it that name to appeal to the Catholic Priest demographic.

I saw the movie way back when it came out and I think it may have been on tv a couple of years later, but I haven't seen it since. I'd have to rewatch it to make any judgement.

IIRC all the crew positions on television and movie productions are the results of agreements with the various unions.

Saw it when it came out back when, seen it multiple times since then. It's a fun Arnold romp, but definitely not one of his better ones. This is near the bottom of his list, just barely above Commando.

It's fun, been a while since I've seen it. I enjoy Richard Dawson's performance: riffing on his own game show host schtick.

So many wonderfully cheesy lines in this movie ("Here's your Sub-Zero! Now...PLAIN zero!", "You bastard! Drop dead!" - "I don't do requests," "Jesus Christ!" - "Guess again," "Get me the President's agent," "One of us is in deep trouble," "He had to split") but my favorite is "Don't touch that dial!"

Oh, come on. Commando is friggin' Grade-A 80's cheese. My least favorite of Arnold's 80s films is Raw Deal, but even it's better than a lot of his 90s stuff (Jingle All the Way, Junior, The Sixth Day).

Yeah, Commando is so-terrible-it's-good.

Love it.

I don't know, I actually kinda liked The Sixth Day. It wasn't high art, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a more successful attempt at engaging larger social issues than The Running Man or even Junior were.

You forgot one:

"Mr. Spock, you have the com."

"Who is Mr. Spock?"

It was definitely not a apocalyptic scenario.

The US still existed. President, Justice Department, military.

It's just a fucked up version of America. The type that gives leftists or conservatives nightmares since each side could dream up a scenario that gets America from here to America in the Running Man while blaming the other side for it.

Same as the book, which is radically different from the movie but I still like the book and wish it would be redone as a movie.

With the exception of On Writing which I consider to be his best book, strangely it's non-fiction, all his fiction books under both names read the same to me in terms of quality.

Fortunately for him I'm not a huge literary snob.

Yeah, watch the opening crawl again.



The global economy has collapsed, and the US is divided up into "paramilitary zones" whatever the fuck that means. It could mean any number of things. The film isn't exactly clear on it, and no matter what scenario you want to claim existed, the movie doesn't really provide evidence for any of it or against it.

Given the ending, it would be interesting to see how the public reacts to it in a post 9/11 world.

There you go again......

You just can't accept that you're wrong.

The Running Man is not a apocalyptic movie. It is a authoritarian dystopia just like @TheBurgerKing said it was.

The US still exists. Yes it's a dictatorship society. We see evidence of that when Richards tries to go to Hawaii and there's serious checkpoints at the airport. We see how the government controls TV and the news. We see that America is a militarized police state.

There is nothing apocalyptic about the movie.

Unless you count a good chunk of L.A. destroyed by an earthquake apocalyptic.

I'd actually consider it an improvement to the country.

But even with LA being shredded by the big one that's still not enough to make this movie a "apocalyptic" one. It just means the government didn't give a fuck enough to clean up the mess.

The government used it as the running Man battleground in the movie, but L.A. remained in tact in the book, Richards had the world to run in, he stole a plane from Stephen King's Maine.

Yes. I've read it. I actually liked this book. The plane scene was pretty tense.