Edgar Wright’s Running Man reboot is off the pace.

There is something undeniably distasteful about watching a story of society collapsing under the bread and circuses hypocrisy of disaster capitalism and the importance of fighting against the injustices when its being brought to you by a studio that’s recently been acquired lock, stock and barrel by an oligarch with deep pockets and deeper connections to the system that’s working to bringing into being what Stephen King originally conceived of as a hyperbolic allegory. It’s an irony that undercuts Edgar Wright’s The Running Man at almost every turn, making the director’s more playful instincts feel ill-suited to a film that should be a science fiction action romp but is increasingly just documentary reportage.

This retelling of The Running Man strips away the neon-spandex camp of the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle and returns to the grim, sweaty panic of Stephen King’s (writing as Richard Bachman) original novel. Yet, in doing so, it achieves a level of corporate cynicism so absolute that it barrels off the track of being a feel-good crowd-pleaser and into more of a funhouse mirror of the world awaiting the audience when the final credits roll. In a near future where America is de facto ruled by an all-powerful cartel of conglomerates with the Network at its head, the economy is in the toilet, and the only way to afford medicine for your sick child is to volunteer to be hunted by professional killers on a TV Show.

Glen Powell steps into the role of Ben Richards, shedding his usual golden retriever energy for the desperation of a man who realises he might just be worth more dead than alive and, in many respects, Powell is inspired casting precisely because he looks like he belongs on the poster. He’s the current standard bearer for the American ideal rendered in flesh, which makes watching him being chased through the dilapidated streets and sewers of a darker, dirtier America oddly satisfying. He isn’t playing an action hero here – at least not one in the Schwarzeneggerian mould – he’s playing a commodity, at least for the early parts of the movie. Wright films him not with the reverence of a superhero director, but with the predatory gaze of a wildlife documentarian capturing a gazelle about to have a very bad day.

The cleverness of this adaptation lies in how it frames the audience; both the baying crowds within the film and us, sitting in the cinema with our popcorn. Wright seems to be aiming to create a seamless bond between the two, inviting us to judge the grotesque spectacle of the Games Network, but then editing with such propulsive, rhythmic enthusiasm that it ends up celebrating the action sequences irrespective of who’s getting the upper hand: runners or hunters. On one level it’s revolting, sure, but the needle drops are fantastic, and the violence has a slapstick rhythm that makes its atrocities digestible, the cinematic equivalent of doom-scrolling while listening to upbeat synth-pop.

It’s in the wider supporting cast that The Running Man seems to lose a step or two. Not because of the performances, Josh Brolin, as the network executive Dan Killian, plays the role with the terrifying benevolence of a tech CEO announcing mass layoffs via Zoom – but in the writing. We don’t spend any time with Killian when he’s not interacting with Richards, so we don’t get a sense of who he is. In 1987’s The Running Man, for all its many flaws, we spend a lot of time with Richard Dawson’s Killian, learning just how shitty a human being he is through how he treats everyone else around him, not just how he interacts with our hero. It brings a depth of flavour to the character that’s absent from Brolin’s incarnation. Likewise, the Hunters, stripped of their WWE-style gimmicks from the 80s and reimagined as tactical influencers, feel anonymous and anodyne even when Lee Pace removes his mask in the rushed and muddled finale and Colman Domingo is wasted in the role of Running Man host, a part that seems written only to provide trailer-ready dialogue snippets.

For all its kinetic, chaotic energy, The Running Man never once feels like an Edgar Wright film. There’s none of his signature cleverness (yes, and smugness), with the attention to detail replaced by a breathlessness to the pacing that ensures you rarely have time to question the morality of what you are watching or, indeed, whether it makes sense. Supporting characters flit in and out as subplots are picked up then discarded like loot boxes and for a film that’s explicitly about a race against a ticking clock, the film has an appallingly poor sense of the passage of time, culminating in a denouement so rushed and incoherent, it feels like a post credit scene hastily spliced back into the main feature.

Where the original version of The Running Man was a kitsch satire that, to its credit, foresaw the imminent rise of reality TV in the nineties, this version of King’s cautionary tale arrives at the moment when its worst ideas are being actualised and its against that backdrop that it seems almost inconceivable cowardly for Wright’s Running Man to lack any kind of satirical spine. In fact, it almost feels like the opposite, a focus-grouped marketing exercise to satiate audiences with the idea of hope and justice while taking their ticket money to fuel the exact corporate oligarchy the film purports to critique. If ever a film deserved to be pirated, it’s this one. It’s what Ben Richards would do.