Running Man on Canal Plus: Edgar Wright signs an angry blockbuster (review)

The director of Baby Driver delivers an imperfect but muscular and committed show, where Glen Powell attempts to take up the torch from the icons of action cinema.

Between a mixed critical reception and a commercial failure, the remake of Running Man released in November 2025 was not the expected success. First still recommends this blockbuster by Edgar Wright, broadcast for the first time on Canal Plus this Friday evening and visible in streaming on MyCanal. Our review:

Ten years after leaving Ant-Manthree months before the start of filming, Edgar Wright finally plunged back into the Hollywood machine. That of big-budget films, IPs under the control of executives in suits and ties, where the authors rarely manage to make their voices heard. Did he emerge a winner from his pact with the devil?

It all started with an exchange on Twitter in 2017, where a fan asked Wright which film he would like to remake. “The Running Man“, the director of the Cornetto trilogy responds just as dryly. Four years later, producer Simon Kimberg sent him an email to ask him if it was true that he wanted to make the film. And here he was embarking on a $110 million blockbuster.

Unlike the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where each feature film is only the new episode of a series broadcast in cinemas led by showrunner Kevin Feige, this project had many advantages for the filmmaker.

Running Man is neither a saga nor a franchise. And certainly not an insurmountable monument of cinema. We’re talking about a little cult film from the 1980s, directed by Paul Michael Glaser (yes, the Dave Starsky of the series Starsky & Hutch), where Arnold Schwarzenegger participates in a macabre television game in a dystopian future where the United States has become a totalitarian dictatorship. So no longer really sci-fi seen from 2025.

This intrigue led to his being condemned for plagiarizing The Price of Dangerafter an 11-year process led by French director Yves Boisset. Reason why the Running Man from 1987 is not broadcast on French television and still cannot be found in legal streaming in our regions.

This somewhat forgotten film was therefore an ideal playground for an unbridled filmmaker who just wanted to have fun with a beautiful toy. And we feel that the director of Last Night in Sohoa dark and complex trip questioning the culture of sixties nostalgia, which unfortunately crashed at the box office, wanted to have a blast. But without compromising completely.

Edgar Wright’s Ben Richards is played by Glen Powell, himself a remake of the great Hollywood actioners, including his role model and mentor Top Gun: MaverickTom Cruise. A worker oppressed by the system because of his big mouth, he finds himself unemployed while he has to pay the medical expenses of his sick daughter. What solution does he have left? Gamble your life as the Running Man to try to win a billion dollars, of course!

Packed with muscles, but not as much as Schwarzy, he appears as a popular hero who, despite the lies of production, manages to win the love of viewers and the citizens he encounters during his run. Viscerally angry with the system, this Richards is driven by an unshakeable determination, he faces obstacles and adventures without ever doubting or failing, or almost.

Running Man can appear as the first commissioned film by Edgar Wright, who would have put aside his authorial inclinations after having learned the lesson ofAnt-Man. He has undoubtedly made two or three concessions, but his mark is there. The frenzied rhythm, the music, the humor, the crazy action scenes. Yes, we are at the director’s house Baby Driver.

Wright wrote the screenplay with Michael Bacall, the co-writer of Scott Pilgrimand offers to Michael Cera a small role, giving rise to a memorable house-trap sequence, between Mom I missed the plane And In pursuit of tomorrow. He also has fun with a conspiratorial YouTube video, signed by a rebel who helped Richards, punctuated by “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” by Gil Scott Heron, recently heard in One battle after another.

Like Paul Thomas Anderson, Edgar Wright plays, despite the noise of his blockbuster status, his little revolutionary music (well muted by the promo). And undoubtedly even more, in a context much more complicated than that of Warner Bros, without the superstar Leonardo DiCaprio to justify his delirium.

This Running Man fully assumes the political scope of Stephen King’s novel (published in 1982 under the pen name Richard Bachman), and even displays an anti-corporation speech – denouncing fake news, the concentration of power and the manipulation of opinion by big companies through the media – quite daring when we take a step back.

Running Man is a Paramount Pictures production, a studio belonging to a group which has undergone a series of mergers in recent years, and whose television part (CBS) was accused of having censored Stephen Colbert’s Late Show after paying 16 million dollars to Donald Trump following legal action by the American president.

As South Park – who signed a new deal worth $1.5 billion over 5 years with Paramount+, before in turn paying off his management and Donald Trump – Wright is not holding back. The spectacle presented on the screen helps get the point across. And if we have some reservations about the lack of development of the characters (Ben Richards is strictly the same at the beginning as at the end), the coherence of the story and its somewhat confused finale, how can we not delight in seeing a European filmmaker paying for the totalitarian drift of capitalist America by being paid by Hollywood, like in the good old days of RoboCop by Paul Verhoeven?

Messy, messy, sometimes cacophonous, but always sincere and generous, the Running Man version 2025 is the antithesis of the recent Tron: Legacy. A true director’s film with soul, everything the public demands from blockbusters, and unfortunately the kind of blockbuster that will not find its audience. In case of failure, Wright can always make us a cornetto… or Ant-Man 4.