The Running Man (1987)

Although I've experienced some pretty awful movies done in the name of Stephen King, I think this is the first full-blown "action" movie of the project. If your movie features a pre-Twins Arnold Schwarzenegger, then I guess it is kind of a requirement. And of course, with an action movie, you get lots of corny one-liners, and this movie is full of them.

On the scale of 0 to Lawnmower Man of how much this movie deviates from the book, I'd give this an 8 or 9. It feels like an adaptation done by somebody who read the tease on the back cover and ran with it. Where the book is more like "The Fugitive", the movie fashions itself as "Smash TV", the hit arcade game of 1990, crossed with "American Gladiators". In fact, this movie was a big influence on that game. Where the book focuses on the grim dystopia of the outside world, the movie struts the glamour of the studio, barely acknowledging the crummy world it exists in. On the other hand, while reading the book was a bit of chore, the movie, while not good, was fun in its own ridiculous way.

The Ahnold version of Ben Richards is not a regular guy. In fact he's a straight up hero and police officer with a good heart that the system decides to crush. He does not enter the game willingly, but rather gets put in after his ultimately-unsuccessful prison break. Just to make sure nobody thinks he's a hero, they show the audience doctored surveillance footage of him massacring (not saving) hundreds of innocent people in Bakersfield (???) that looks suspiciously like the first scene of the movie. I guess they have super sophisticated cameras. The game itself isn't a real-world hide-n-seek game, but a real-life video game where the contestants fight "boss"-grade characters to their deaths. Judging from the rather horrified reaction of these bosses getting killed, it seems like they usually win. In fact, any incident of a contestant winning is quickly proven to be patently fake. Of course against all these odds, Ben Richards does not die, not by his own hand or those of others. Instead he bests the hopped-up American Gladiators (including Jesse Ventura, as a reluctant fan-favorite), beating not only the game but launching a revolution over everything wrong in the world. It's a feel-good finish, but not exactly original.

I can't leave this without a couple casting notes. First off, there is no way you can watch classic Family Feud after seeing Richard Dawson in this, and I mean it as a compliment. The guy best known for kissing female contestants in ways that would invalidate any potential run for the Democratic presidential nomination is dropping F-bombs and stage managing on-air death like a stone cold gangster. For all the failings of the movie, Dawson's casting was a stroke of brilliance. On a smaller note, Mick Fleetwood plays a guy named Mick who seems pretty bummed that bands like Fleetwood Mac aren't around in this parallel hell-world. I'd say he's probably pretty happy with our boring wold of tepid reality television, or at least consoling himself with the take from the latest world tour.