Watch The Runningman Online

Rated: PG-13

Genre: Action | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Release date: November 13, 1987

Runtime: 1 hr 37 mins

Director: Paul Michael Glaser

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Conchita Alonso, Yaphet Kotto, Jim Brown, Jesse Ventura

Originally released in 1987 and now finding new life on iReel.com, The Running Man is an action packed, steroid pumped satire of today’s entertainment landscape. Opening with the words, “By 2017 the world economy has collapsed. Food, natural resources and oil are in short supply,” the film leaves no doubt that it was not only prescient about the state of the world today, it was also way ahead of its time in describing the decay of the 20th century’s true opiate of the masses: television.
Loosely based on the novella by Richard Bachman (a.k.a. Stephen King), Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Ben Richards, a good man wrongly accused and sentenced to compete on television’s most bloodthirsty reality show, appropriately named The Running Man. Winning brings freedom, but losing will cost him his life. Of course, well on his way to becoming the biggest movie star on the planet, my money is on Arnie to come out on top in a battle with futuristic hunters dressed in hockey gear and Lite Brite.
1987, when the movie was released, was an era when Cosby and Macgyver were two of the top rated shows on television and The Running Man’s portrayal of “reality” shows like Climbing for Dollars (where contestants are eaten by ravenous dogs if they lose their grip) and The Hate Boat was perceived as being farfetched. In today’s media climate of shows like Fear Factor, Survivor and the grand-daddy of them all, American Gladiators, the satire of The Running Man becomes a bone-chillingly apt indictment of audience’s ever increasing hunger for violence and the network’s escalating desire to feed that hunger. If anything, The Running Man is a far better film today than it was when it was released.
Of course, there’s no getting around the fact that, at its core, The Running Man is all about the action. The movie isn’t as gory as modern audiences have come to expect, but that’s not to say that it is in any way tame. Blades and bullets fly as fast and as furious as the many cheese-filled one liners Arnold serves up, and there are plentiful helpings of gruesome deaths; from impalements and exploding heads to one man who dies in a way guaranteed to make every Y chromosome in the audience to squirm. If I tell you that this is a movie where the hero fires machine guns one-handed, launches three classic one liners and has already piled up a body count of 20, all before the opening credits, you’ll know that this is a movie that eats dynamite and drinks gasoline.
Both Schwarzenegger and his co-star Jesse “The Body” Ventura went on to become governors, but in The Running Man they showcase a much more direct form of diplomacy, the kind that only an 80’s action movie can deliver. Watch The Running Man now, anywhere, only on iReel.com

Justin Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller