The Running Man (1987)

The Running Man arrives from 1987 carrying a premise that has aged into uncomfortable prophecy and a production history that has aged into anecdote. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a framed police captain dropped into a lethal game show, presided over by Richard Dawson, who plays the smiling executioner with the oily ease of a man who spent decades reading contestants' faces for a living. The satire aims at state media, rigged ratings, and the cheerful complicity of a studio audience that votes with its applause. It is a mean little film wearing a tracksuit.

The cast is a broad action ensemble of the era, drawing on Black performers and international faces without ever making their presence a subject of comment, which is to say the production hired people and moved along. The female lead exists to doubt the hero, then believe him, then be rescued and kissed, and the film does not linger on the arrangement. Racial identity goes unexamined. The environment is not a concern. Nobody discusses their body or their mental health, because the film has other business, most of it involving men in costumes being thrown through drywall.

Where the film does carry a charge is in its contempt for the machinery of spectacle, the widening distance between the shantytowns and the towers, and the willingness of power to manufacture a villain for the evening news. That anger is aimed at authoritarianism more than at capital itself, and it is delivered through stunt work, one-liners, and a chainsaw rather than a lecture. The sermonizing, such as it is, arrives in the shape of a hockey-themed assassin and a host who cannot stop smiling. The result is a modest artifact of pre-millennial discontent, sincere in its cynicism and entirely innocent of the cultural vocabulary that would later be demanded of it.