Film reviews: The Running Man starts flagging long before the finish line
Glenn Powell in Running Man.
- The Running Man
- ★★★★☆
- Cinematic release
We have nothing to fear but fear itself, as US president Franklin Roosevelt once said, but FDR didn’t have to reckon with Stephen King.
Hot on the heels of September’s The Long Walk comes , another King adaptation set in the near future that trades in dystopia, paranoia, and persecution.
Ben Richards (Glen Powell) is an unemployed rabble-rouser with a dying child who reluctantly agrees to take part in a reality TV show where the participants can win $1bn if they can survive for 30 days without being executed by a dedicated team of hunters.
Nobody has ever won the prize, but Richards quickly proves himself to be unusually resourceful, piquing the interest of the show’s producer, Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), who senses that Richards might be the ratings-buster the show badly needs.
Adapted and directed by Edgar Wright, this remake of the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle starts in sprightly fashion as Richards goes ducking and diving through a vast, sprawling slum and tentatively establishes connections with plebs who secretly resist “the barbarism of the Roman colosseum”.
Had Wright sustained this initial narrative drive, the film would have been an effectively muscular sci-fi action story, but gradually the story shifts focus to Richards’s relationship with the scheming Killian, and eventually becomes a rather heavy-handed satire on the power of a malign media where Richards rejects the opportunity to become “a cog in the propaganda machine” because he is that most dangerous of beasts — “a free man with a conscience”.
Glen Powell is well cast as a square-jawed hero who defies the cultural hegemony to become a symbol of revolution, and the first hour is a visually inventive and pulsating roller-coaster, but the story itself runs out of steam as it trudges towards its inevitable climax.
- Nuremberg
- ★★★★☆
- Cinematic release
Opening in 1945, stars Rami Malek as Douglas Kelley, a psychiatrist commissioned by the US army to interview the remaining members of the Nazi leadership in the lead-up to their trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Striking up a relationship with the complex Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), Kelley quickly realises that this unprecedented event and his unlimited access offers the opportunity to “dissect evil” — providing that he can outwit the unrepentant Göring.
Adapted from Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, and directed by James Vanderbilt, Nuremberg is rooted in the real-life relationship between Kelley and Göring, whilst also exploring — via Robert H Jackson (Michael Shannon), an associate justice on the US Supreme Court — the complications of conducting a trial for which there is no legal precedent.
An absorbing drama of psychological cat-and-mouse, with Crowe grotesquely charismatic as the arrogant but intelligent Göring, Nuremberg is elevated onto a whole other plane when the trial incorporates historical footage of the concentration camps.
- Keeper
- ★★★☆☆
- Cinematic release
stars Tatiana Maslany and Rossif Sutherland as Liz and Malcom, a couple celebrating their one-year anniversary with a romantic getaway in a remote cabin in the woods.
But Liz, in dreams and reveries, seems to be able to sense the presence of women who have died violently in the cabin over many centuries, and Malcolm’s uxorious devotion begins to take on sinister undertones.
Written by Nick Lepard and directed by Osgood Perkins, Keeper is terrific for the first hour, with cinematographer Jeremy Cox discovering all manner of off-kilter angles and unsettlingly unusual perspectives, and he also makes superb use of the dank, primeval forest.
There are strong performances, with Tatiana Maslany particularly good as the neurotic, cynical Liz, who is still trying to figure out if Malcom is the real deal.
The final act is both wildly improbable and conventional in terms of the tropes it employs to explain the underlying horror.
