The Running Man Movie Review 298

  
The Running Man is a 1987 Sci-Fi movie directed by Paul Michael Glaser and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura,Richard Dawson and Maria Conchita Alonso. It is based on a Stephen King novel of the same name.

The year is 2017 and America is a police state.There is a game show called The Running Man and it features a criminal who has to survive being hunted and attacked by different warriors. If they escape, they are supposedly free to go. A police man called Ben Richards(Schwarzenegger) is accused of a crime that he didn't commit and he is sentenced to jail. 18 months later, he and some others escape from the jail. They go to a rebel camp where some resistance fighters are.He meets the leader, Mic(Mick Fleetwood) who wants him to join, but he doesn't want to. He go to his brother's place but finds a woman called Amber Mendez(Alonso) living there. He takes her hostage, hoping to escape, but she shops him in and he is caught. She works for the TV company who makes The Running Man. She thinks that she is doing the right thing but later, she wonders.

Richards is put into the game show The Running Man as a contestant and his two friends from jail are there too. Richards makes his way through the warriors as they attack him. The audience are amazed as nobody has ever survived so long. Amber is discovered snooping through files at the TV station and put into the game show too. There are access codes to the games system and Amber gets them. The shows presenter Killian(Dawson) is stumped and he creates a computer generated video of Amber and Ben dead to placate the audience.Amber and Ben get kidnapped by the resistance and they go to their hideout and give them the access codes so they can get into the system. They show that Richards is innocent and that the past winners of the show were killed anyway and not freed.Richards takes care of Killian and Amber and Ben walk away from the show together.

This was an entertaining and interesting movie. The baddie Killian was good and I liked it overall. Not an Oscar winning movie, but good fun. If you like Arnie movies, then you will enjoy this! I give it a 6/10.