This is one of those examples of the original being better than the reboot. Schwarzenegger’s 1987 adaptation of the Stephen King film is pure camp, a thing of joy. The reboot, helmed by the very capable Edgar Wright makes tweaks so that the concept feels less Battle Royale and more Hunger Games, which some hopeful critics see as a sort of “too soon/on the nose” for our contemporary politics, but really just feels unnecessarily self-referential. At a certain point why are you even adapting IP? Why not just make an entirely original movie?
Edgar Wright’s writing leaves us with a sort of a stale husk of a character in our protagonist Ben Richards, played by the dreamy Glen Powell, but despite the fact that the entire premise of this contest is that Richards has to lie low for 30 whole days to win his prize money, which should presumably require quite a bit of chameleon-like impressions and costumes–which Powell excels at!–he spends minimal time in disguise.
Powell plays such an earnest goody-two-shoes that it grates. You’re actually hoping that he will snap a little so that you can get some complexity in his character or the storytelling. There are a few moments when it seems like maybe it’ll happen, like when he accidentally firebombs an entire apartment complex despite being a sort of man of the people urban hero type guy. The concept of collateral damage actually seems like it could open up an interesting moral issue for Richards, but the blame is tidily shifted to the Bad Guys, who simultaneously have so much power that they can completely manipulate the entire media landscape to control public sentiment but also have so little power that they can’t manage to harm him in any significant way even when it matters most.
The casting of Lee Pace (Bodies Bodies Bodies) as the attack dog for the Bad Guys is undercut by the fact that he has to wear a mask for almost the entirety of the movie. Some of the best slapstick combat happens with Michael Cera deep into the second act, but you have to wait so long to get to it that it really feels like a let down, especially because the plot there is so nonsensical that it renders itself superfluous. So much of this movie is superfluous though: 30 days of survival for a billion dollars and we want to see every moment of how Richards is able to outsmart the Big Bads, but it becomes clear from the outset that they are in control of every aspect of his success from a clever meta analysis by a superfan that goes nowhere and doesn’t actually end up contributing to his outsmarting the Big Bads later.
There’s a moment in the final act when it seems like the movie might be able to do something interesting with the split-screening of misinformation and reality, but it devolves into a sort of lazy boss fight that’s mostly just two guys bluffing each other and shouting at FaceTime because they can’t be in the same room for narrative reasons, I guess.
Roger Corman did it better in 1975.
