Review of The Running Man (1987) by Dylan D — 20 May 2010

'The Running Man' is one of those great over-the-top action movies from the '80s with lots of violence, cheesy one-liners and ridiculous characters and settings. This film also does a good job at satirizing society by mocking real life entertainment like reality shows and the way products are marketed towards consumers, which kind of reminded me of 'Robocop' in a way. It's strange to think about though because at the time this came out reality shows weren't really around, at least not like they are now. In any case this is an awesome action movie and one of my personal favorites of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's just too bad that this movie is often overlooked because of his much bigger hits like 'Terminator' and 'Predator'.

The year is 2019, the plot revolves around Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a former military pilot framed and convicted of massacring hundreds of innocent people which he actually tried to prevent. After escaping the labor camp he was sent to he attempts to kidnap a woman named Amber Mendez (Maria Conchita Alonso) who was living in the apartment his brother used to live in and use her to help him get on a plane to Hawaii unnoticed. Unfortunely he is caught by ICS secruity and sent to be a contestant and the reality game show "The Running Man" hosted by the sadistic and greedy Damon Killian (Richard Dawson). Richards must fight for his life against a bunch of "stalkers", killers trained to mutilate anyone put in front of them for the sake of entertainment. How do you win the game show? Don't die!

First off the music in this movie is so laughable, even for the '80s it was bad. Still it fits the film. The cast is great. Arnold is awesome as always, he's basically the essential action hero so you can never go wrong with him. He has some seriously corny lines though, as usual. "Killian, here's your Subzero, now plain zero!"... Yeah. All the "stalkers" are very cool and unique too, using very different styles and weapons to kill their opponents. For example Buzzsaw drives around on a motorcycle and wields chainsaws while Subzero is a sumo hockey player with a razor sharp hockey stick. I have to say the best one though is Dynamo. He's this fat opera singer who wears this weird plastic suit with with a bunch of Christmas lights on it and drives around in a dune buggy and uses electricity to kill people. It's so ridicualously awesome.

My favorite character in the movie though is the host Damon Killian. He's such an evil bastard. He doesn't care about human life, all he cares about is his ratings. He's so deceiving though because when he's the host he's so charming and nice to the audience (much like Richard Dawson actually was on the 'Family Feud'), but when he talks to anyone else he's a prick, this is especially true when it comes to Ben Richards. The only reason he does it though is because he knows that there's nothing Richards can do to him (or so he thought). In the end when Richards finally confronts him, Killian actually has the balls to argue that it's all just for television and it's nothing personal. What a dick, great bad guy though.

Now I usually don't talk about the different release versions of films in my reviews but I found this one interesting. I had assumed since this is such an underrated movie that the DVD wouldn't have too much on it aside from the usual wide or full screen and 5.1 dolby digital sound, so you can imagine my surprise when I found a 2-disc special edition. It has some audio commentaries, two documentaries and even some "Meet The Stalkers" bio cards. I didn't really care too much for the documentaries though, they were too boring and had far too much of a serious and preachy tone for regarding a movie that is meant to be somewhat humorous and satirical. Sure the movie has some underlying messages but it also has Arnold Schwarzenegger grinding up a guy's balls with a chainsaw. You gotta' draw a line somewhere, you know what I mean? Still if you're going to buy it (which I highly recommend) this is the version to get. Enjoy!