I have always loved this movie, but I'm not sure why. Firstly, this movie is ugly as hell. The entire movie is obviously shot on a sound stage, and poorly. The detail that went into set design is very lack lustre. Even as a kid, I knew this movie was ugly, and I always chalked it up to the fact it was 1987. But now that I'm older, and have taken the time to watch a lot of 80s movies, I now see that the late 80s was a very advanced time for movies. Even 1980's Blade Runner was beautifully detailed, and shot.The constant colour tone of this movie is so droning. If you could hear the colour, it would sound like a collection of low frequencies, eating away at your sanity. The lights and colours seem to overshadow the poor detail of the sets, so I wonder if thats why they went with bold lights. But at the same time as doing that, it masked whats actually happening in the movie. You can't see most of the battle scenes, because you have such an overbearing amount of red, or blue, or whatever colour "works" with which arena.I get the feeling this movie was severely edited for rating. There are certain parts where things seem to rush, and its not justified. One part in particular is the attempted rape scene, by Dynamo. Amber gets knocked on the ground, and all of a sudden Dynamo has his pants off. There are other parts in the movie like this, which make me wonder whether there is a harder rated directors cut somewhere.Story? What story? I know this movie has a "story", but its all just set up basically. In my opinion, this movie is a live action 80s video game. Because videogames of this time were exactly the same. They had stories, but they were all just for set up. The gameplay carried the games, and the stories were just for your imagination. It works for this movie though, somehow. The gameplay keeps you entertained, and the story doesn't matter. Something that I thought fell short, even in the gameplay side of it though, was the final boss. I think Arnie could've killed Killian a lot better.All in all, this movie is great. Maybe for nostalgic reasons, maybe because I like bad movies, but for some reason, I like it.

This is a movie with a message, and the message is: this is not a good movie. It's very badly written. The acting is awful. It isn't even well lit, making you long for an earlier era when that was kind of a minimum."The Running Man" keeps hitting you over the head letting you know it's set in the future, and it's a bad future. But it never feels like anyone who knew or cared about science-fiction or action had a thing to do with it. It does feel like, some people with way more money than sense decided you didn't need to know anything about making movies to make one. And if they knew anyone with knowledge about how to make a good one, they went way out of their way not to ask them about it.It doesn't even work as a piece of lowly exploitation, unless a few shots of Maria Conchita-Alonso in form-fitting Lycra are enough to make you blush. I was stunned to recall critics of this era said Arnold Schwarzeneger was not a good actor, since his performance is the only thing that makes this tolerable to watch for even a second. Richard Dawson's attempts to portray a malevolent game-show host are something that should have been left on the cutting-room floor of "Family Feud."Lacking any type of momentum, the movie makes attempts to whip up emotion in the viewer, attempts which work out as ludicrously failed as everything else.Not helping anything either is the fact that fashion has moved on, and people do not usually appear covered in Lycra nowadays, as they do in "Running Man." And for that, at least, I feel grateful.

The Running Man is directed by Paul Michael Glaser and adapted from the Stephen King (as Richard Bachman) story by Steven E. de Souza. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Conchita Alonso, Richard Dawson, Yaphet Kotto, Jim Brown, Jesse Ventura, Erland van Lidth, Marvin J. McIntyre, Gus Rethwisch, Professor Toru Tanaka and Mick Fleetwood. Music is by Harold Faltermeyer and cinematography by Thomas Del Ruth.It may be packed with cheese, but this is one great and astutely entertaining futuristic slice of sci-fi pie. Schwarzenegger becomes a reluctant contestant in the most popular TV show of the time, The Running Man. It's a sadistic show where convicts are thrust into a zonal world and have to avoid an array of stalking killers. Cue lots of outrageous violence, equally outrageous costumes, and of course with Arnold in the lead there's plenty of dialogue zingers. The caustic observation of how television programmes have evolved is potently portentous, and it's all played out to an industrial 80s score from Faltermeyer.It helps if you know what you are going to get from it, because it's a typical Schwarzenegger movie of the era, thus it's very much one for his fans to lap up with glee. 7/10

A wrongly convicted man (Arnold Schwarzenegger) must try to survive a public execution gauntlet staged as a game show.Original director Andrew Davis was fired one week into filming and replaced by Glaser. Schwarzenegger has stated this was a "terrible decision" as Glaser "shot the movie like it was a television show, losing all the deeper themes". I don't know if this is true or not, as it would be really hard to comment on a version of a film that doesn't exist.I think the themes are still there: the American love of violence, the growing prominence of television and ratings, the distrust of government. Sure, it is covered with a candy shell. Amid the violence, we have some silly characters (Dynamo) and plenty of one-liners. This may have the most Schwarzenegger one-liners in a single film, and they are appropriately awful.