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 written by King to depict the distant year of 2025. In other words, it should’ve been a cinch to make an action movie that appeals to the immiserated American masses in our very real dystopian 2025, instead of the expensive box-office dud this is.