The Running Man (1987) Review: 6/10

Name: The Running Man
Genre: Action, Dystopian, Satire, Science Fiction
Released: 1987
Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, Maria Conchita Alonso, Richard Dawson, Yaphet Kotto

TL;DR: The Running Man (1987) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The Running Man is a better idea than film. The concept, a death sport television show operating as the primary mechanism of social control in a dystopia.

Official trailer

The Running Man (1987)6 / 10

The Running Man is a better idea than film. The concept, a death sport television show operating as the primary mechanism of social control in a dystopian future, with professional killers branded as entertainment heroes and political prisoners as contestants, is prescient in ways that 1987 couldn’t have fully anticipated. The film was there first with an insight that later decades have made less like satire and more like documentation.

My rating: 6 out of 10. Good for its time, with Richard Dawson as the film’s sharpest achievement, Schwarzenegger in a role that fits his capabilities, and a satirical concept that’s only become more relevant as reality has narrowed the gap with the exaggeration.

I enjoy this movie more than I respect it. The idea is sharper than anything the film does with it, and whenever Dawson is off screen I can feel it sliding back into a standard eighties Schwarzenegger chase.

The Satire and Its Target

Glaser’s The Running Man is a satire of reality television twenty years before reality television became a cultural dominant. The elements Glaser and screenwriter Steven de Souza identified, the host who treats contestant suffering as entertainment content, the production apparatus that manufactures narrative around real violence, the audience that participates in the management of public perception through controlled spectacle, are all present in forms that 1987 audiences would have recognized as exaggeration and that 2025 audiences recognize as description.

This is the problem with satirical exaggeration: the exaggeration has a shelf life determined by the distance between the target and the satirical version.

In 1987 televised death as entertainment was a disturbing extrapolation from a television industry that hadn’t yet invented The Real World, Survivor, or the wider apparatus of what we now call reality television. The distance between the real and the satirical was large enough to generate satirical charge. That distance has narrowed considerably.

The shrinking distance leaves the film’s insight intact and turns it prophetic instead of satirical, a different and maybe more interesting category. The Running Man saw where things were going and got there early, the best position for satire to be in and the worst for a satire to stay in. I give it real credit for that foresight, and I wish the rest of the film had been as sharp as the premise.

For Writers The Running Man shows that satire has a shelf life determined by the distance between the exaggeration and the reality it satirizes. Satire aimed at a target that could plausibly catch up with the exaggeration will date in ways that satire aimed at permanent features of human nature won’t. If you’re writing satire, ask how much your satirical charge depends on the target remaining more restrained than your version of it. If the target might catch up, build the satire around something more durable than the gap, the underlying human behavior instead of its specific contemporary expression.

Richard Dawson

Richard Dawson as Killian is the film’s best achievement and its most pointed. Dawson was a real game show host, on Family Feud. That gives his performance a documentary quality that no other casting choice could have provided. He’s a game show host playing a fictional version of what game show hosts become when the cultural logic of game shows is followed to its conclusion.

The performance is smarmy, cheerful, and completely at home in a universe where murder is primetime entertainment.

Killian doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong. He thinks he’s entertaining people, managing a brand, and maintaining the public’s trust in the social order. The gap between his professional self-image and the reality of what he’s doing is the film’s sharpest satirical point, and Dawson plays it with complete conviction. Every scene with him is sharper than the scenes without him. The film knows this and uses him well.

Dawson is the reason I’d sit through this again. That grin of his, warm and dead at the same time, is scarier than any of the killers the show sends out, and I think he knew exactly what he was doing with it.

For Writers Killian works as a character because he believes in what he’s doing. He’s not a mustache-twirling villain who knows he’s evil and enjoys it. He’s a professional who has internalized the values of his institution so completely that the institution’s cruelty reads to him as service. Villains who believe in their own worldview are more frightening and more interesting than villains who are simply performing evil. Give your antagonists real conviction in their own version of events. The horror comes from the gap between their self-image and the reality, not from their awareness of the gap.

Schwarzenegger in the Role

Schwarzenegger is properly cast as a human bulldozer and the film knows it. Ben Richards isn’t a character who benefits from depth or interiority, he’s a man of action in a situation that requires action, and Schwarzenegger’s capabilities are exactly right for what the film needs him to do. His physicality, his quality of competent indifference to the obstacles in front of him, and his complete absence of the ironic self-awareness that would undermine the film’s straight-faced commitment to its premise all serve the material correctly.

The one-liners following each villain’s death are the film’s lowest common denominator and also some of its most memorable moments. That tells you something about the balance the film is trying to strike between satire and action entertainment. “He was a real pain in the neck” lands at a level that makes you slightly ashamed of yourself for laughing, the correct response to a film that’s trying to make you laugh at things it also wants you to find disturbing.

Those one-liners are where I’m most torn. I laugh at them, then I remember the film wants me to feel bad about laughing, and I can’t tell whether that’s clever or just an excuse to keep the audience cheering the body count.

Is The Running Man worth watching?

It gets its 6 and no more. The concept deserved a braver film, and what it gets is a smart premise wrapped around a fairly ordinary action picture, lifted every time Dawson walks on and sagging when he walks off. Schwarzenegger does exactly what’s asked of him, and the film never asks much. I’d still recommend it for the satire. Reality has only made it more accurate as the distance between the exaggeration and the real thing has narrowed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the novel better?

Stephen King’s novel (written as Richard Bachman) is considerably darker and follows the satirical logic to a harder conclusion. The film’s resolution is significantly more optimistic. The novel is the version that fully honors what the premise requires. Both are worth your time.

How accurate was The Running Man’s prediction of reality television?

More accurate than it had any right to be in 1987. Not literally, we don’t have branded killers competing for audience approval on network television. But the underlying logic, that entertainment appetite will expand to accommodate formats that were previously unacceptable, that suffering and conflict will be packaged as content, that the audience’s relationship to real human distress can be managed through production, has played out in ways the film described before the industry that would produce it existed.

Why is Dawson’s performance the best thing in The Running Man?

Because he was a real game show host playing a fictional version of what game show hosts become when followed to their logical extreme. That documentary quality, the authenticity of someone who knows what it feels like to stand in front of a camera and manage audience enthusiasm for entertainment, is impossible to fake and unavailable to any other casting choice. He doesn’t play Killian as a villain. He plays him as a professional, and that’s more disturbing.