Edgar Wright’s dystopian satire, The Running Man, tries to play it safe and ends up pleasing no one.

Everything is wrong with Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, and I say that as someone who’s long been rooting for him. I’m a big fan of his early films Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007). I liked his 2021 rock-documentary The Sparks Brothers, and I even appreciated parts of Baby Driver (2017) and Last Night in Soho (2021).

But his latest is such a misfire that’s downright weird.

The Running Man isn’t quite a remake of the cheesy old 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle mainly because Wright wanted to do a more faithful take on the original source material: Stephen King’s very prescient 1982 novel. It’s about a dystopian future America run by a corporate media network, and it was wri

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