Alrighty then. Due to priorities of hunting chupacabra under the most rarest of Turkey Moons, I wasn’t able to review this one the day of release, so fuckit, a few days late don’t make a difference. Either you saw it opening weekend or you didn’t. For those that paused, I will not spoil, persay. But I will say, if you liked the book, you will like the movie. Mostly. If you liked the Schwarzeneggerized 80s version and expected a remake of that? Yeah, no, you probably won’t like this. It’s like 8.7% cheese here versus 91.4% cheese of the first. So, good job on the serious adaptation. Mostly.
Ben Richards is a man between a rock and a hard place. Despite being a solid worker, his penchant for wanting to protect his fellow man puts him on the blacklist of Troublesomes. Plus maybe has a few anger issues. When his kid gets sick and he needs to grovel to get his job back just to pay for the medicines, well, it doesn’t go well. Being a fully dystopian society where there’s not a lot of work or pay, there’s always the Big Game Shows to get rich. Especially on ‘The Running Man.’ But no, that’s not an option. Until, well...
I won’t revisit the review of the first one here, I said my piece on that oh so long ago. I will give director Edgar Wright some credit for doing a pretty good adaptation here, including kinda pooching the ending in true Stephen King fashion. But not completely. Overall, pretty faithful to the original story. King was kind of a tard even back then in the early 1970s or whenever he wrote this, so whatever current events kinda projections you may have on some of the casting, well, most of that was in the book too. It’s really not that deep of a story. Just some pretty boilerplate dystopian authoritarian fascist [insert latest systemic buzzword word here] kinda anti-establishment trope kinda stuff here. Hey, don’t get me wrong. This is absolutely an anti-gubmint type of story. And it’s done well. With the current environment though, it might...maybe be interpreted the wrong way? Burnit! Burnit all down. In Minecraft, of course.
