[COLUMN] In The Running Man, Glen Powell Is Still Deeply Cynical About Movie Stardom | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains some spoilers for the third act of The Running Man, which is in theatres this weekend. It spoils at least one of the movie’s five endings, but presumably the one that wasn’t a hasty reshoot. The film itself is a mess - solidly entertaining and adequate in its first two-thirds, with a third act that seems to build to a genuinely bold and radical conclusion, only to retreat from that to one of the most cowardly endings in recent blockbuster cinema, a disastrous decision that causes the whole movie to crash and burn. Still, it is really interesting as a Glen Powell vehicle.

Glen Powell has an incredible natural charisma. He is an insanely handsome man who gives very good interviews and who seems to possess both a winning sense of humor and a genuine enthusiasm for the artform in which he works. It is no surprise that Tom Cruise, the King of Hollywood, seemed to anoint Powell as his chosen successor. However, what is surprising is the recurring sense that Powell is somewhat ambivalent to his pre-determined movie stardom.

Powell would seem to have a very clear path to movie stardom. The actor has worked in the industry for over a decade, including small roles in The Dark Knight Rises and a breakout performance in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, but he really popped in streaming romantic comedy Set It Up and in a supporting role in Top Gun: Maverick, hopping from those to incredible success in theatrical romantic comedy Anyone But You and the blockbuster legacyquel Twisters.

It's possible to look at those films and to chart Powell’s course to massive stardom. He fits very neatly into that familiar Hollywood archetype, the insanely (perhaps even impossibly) handsome man who comes off as a bit of a jerk at first but eventually reveals that he has a heart of gold. He can play a devilish rogue, but the kind of guy who the audience also feels safe with. Powell could jump on almost any mainstream blockbuster franchise and write his own ticket. Powell should be a movie star.

However, Powell seems to have pushed back against the inevitability of his own success. He has largely rejected big franchise plays. He turned down a Bourne reboot and Jurassic World: Rebirth at Universal. He has denied reports that he will succeed Tom Cruise in the Mission: Impossible series. Powell has openly stated that he has no interest in joining any of the major ongoing comic book universes. Powell is not following the preordained playbook for contemporary young actors.

There is, of course, a reason for this. That path does not produce movie stars. The promising young actors who give themselves over to the franchise machine often get swallowed by it. Talent like Chris Hemsworth or Chris Evans can give themselves over to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but that career gives them little leverage in return. People will turn out to see a Thor movie and catch Extraction on streaming, but audiences won’t flock to Blackhat.

This may explain why so many emerging young talents are wary of this machinery. Sydney Sweeney has acknowledged that her role in Madame Web was a “strategic business decision” to convince Sony would greenlight Anyone But You. Timothée Chalamet has been quite open and quite candid about how badly he wants to be taken seriously as a credible actor. Powell is not quite as overt as Chalamet, but he is also charting his own path through the Hollywood wilderness.

In particular, Powell’s follow-ups to Anyone But You and Twisters feel like thoughtful meditations on the very idea of acting in general and movie stardom in particular. It is worth noting that Powell is not just a performer, he is a creative. He shares writing credits on several of these projects. He didn’t just star in Hit Man, he co-wrote it with director Richard Linklater. He co-created Chad Powers with Michael Waldron and co-wrote the first episode. In these projects, Powell is an authorial voice.

On paper, these projects seem like reasonable star vehicles for an emerging actor. Hit Man is a romantic comedy about a guy who pretends to be a contract killer. Chad Powers is about a disgraced football player who goes undercover in college football and ends up inspiring a small Georgia team. The Running Man is an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, which had previously been adapted as one of the movies that helped establish Arnold Schwarzenegger as a star.

However, if one scratches the surface of any of these projects, the result is inevitably weirder than the pitch might suggest. Hit Man is not a comedy about murder and mayhem. The film acknowledges that hit men largely don’t exist outside the world of pulp crime stories. It is instead the story of a philosophy professor (Powell) who goes undercover inventing a variety of colorful personas through costuming and make-up. In doing so, this otherwise boring guy discovers something within himself.

Chad Powers is built around something similar, with a washed up and cancelled celebrity (Powell) using prosthetics to create an alternate persona for himself in the style of identity comedies like Mrs. Doubtfire or Tootsie. The show takes place adjacent to the world of celebrity and Hollywood. The opening episode features a cameo from Haliey Welch and the lead character’s father (Toby Huss) is a legendary make-up artist who is currently working on a Michael Bay movie.

These are both stories about acting. In particular, they are stories about the process of acting. They are the work of a person who has thought about their craft and the nature of performance, and often feel like the product of a person who finds something inherently weird about it all. In Hit Man, the lines between actor and character blur, in the same way that the film blurs the boundaries of the true story that inspired it and the audience’s expectations of a story about a hit man.

There is a similar tension in Chad Powers, which plays with the classic narrative idea that forcing a bad person to pretend to be a decent person for an extended period of time will inevitably make them a good person – that goodness is a performance, and that the act of doing good has a transformative property. Like the ending of Hit Man, the final episode of Chad Powers turns that assumption on its head, suggesting that performance is nothing more than that: performance.

There is a strong sense of Powell as somebody who has thought a lot about the work that he does, the way that is mythologized and the reality of the experience of it. There is a tension in both Hit Man and Chad Powers between how narratives like that expect performance to work and how it actually works. As such, Powell’s work in The Running Man, his first big blockbuster leading role since Twisters, feels like an extension of this idea.

In The Running Man, Powell plays Ben Richards. Richards is chosen as one of three participants to compete in the eponymous televised reality competition. He is set loose within America, with every citizen in the country asked to track him down so that he can be hunted and killed. He is chosen by sleazy producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), because Killian recognized that Richards has a natural star power. People are drawn to him. People like to root for him. People want to watch him.

On paper, this feels like an open goal for Powell. Killian sees the same thing in Richards that audiences recognized in Powell in Twisters, that ineffable je ne sais quoi that makes a movie star. Indeed, one of the great magic tricks of The Running Man is that the film doesn’t ever really need to demonstrate Richards’ star bona fides, because Powell arrives with it in the bank. This guy should be a star, and Killian is going to make Richards the most famous man in America.

However, once again, Powell makes the more interesting choice instead of the easy one. The Running Man is not a movie about how Richards is an insanely charming and handsome guy who has that magic quality that separates movie stars from character actors. Instead, Powell plays Richards as an incredibly angry and vicious man with a naturally violent impulse. The film even gives Richards a small y-shaped scar on his forehead that makes it look like a vein that is constantly ready to pop.

Richards doesn’t want to be a celebrity. He doesn’t want to be famous. He doesn’t want to be part of this infernal machinery. This obviously makes sense in the context of the film, because who would want to be hunted for money? At the same time, this adaptation of The Running Man is much more interested in the notion and the idea of celebrity than the earlier take on the source material. Ben is chased by cameras, narrativized in the press, mischaracterized and misrepresented.

At one point, having narrowly escaped an attempted assassination, Richards grabs one of the hovering cameras and stares down the barrel. “Stop filming me!” he screams. The Running Man is obviously a bigger story about American late capitalism, contemporary politics and the corrosive power of reality television. However, it is also the story of a guy who does not want to be a star, even as the machinery around him tries to force him into that role.

At the climax of the film, the confrontation between Richards and Killian boils down to a contract negotiation, with Killian pitching Richards on his own spin-off from the hit series. Franchising is the future. It is a heightened version of those meetings that Powell must have taken, offering him a Jurassic Park legacyquel or a Bourne reboot. Killian’s pitch that Richards succeeds the champion from the first competition, McCone (Lee Pace), even recalls the idea Powell might replace Tom Cruise.

The Running Man is not the first dystopian science-fiction narrative to engage with this subtext. A large part of the reason that Catching Fire is the best of the four original Hunger Game movies is because the film manages to balance its broad social commentary with a more specific exploration of Jennifer Lawrence’s stardom – the idea that the machinery that would propel such a young woman to that level of fame, reducing her to an object for public consumption, is predatory and exploitative. The Running Man affords Richards more agency, but the underlying ideas are the same.

This is perhaps the most interesting tension within The Running Man. This is a story about a guy who doesn’t want to be a star, but within the framework of a blockbuster that needs a movie star at its core. Powell’s performance is bold and confrontational, giving Richards a much rougher edge than protagonists in these sorts of movies are often allowed to have. Perhaps the best thing about The Running Man is that it is a blockbuster that allows itself to feel genuine anger about the world.

Ultimately, The Running Man doesn’t quite work – in part because the movie cannot reconcile the need to be a crowd-pleasing spectacle with the justifiable rage it feels at the world in which it was made. This is a circle that is impossible to square, a tension obvious in a closing sequence that feels like a composite of four different hastily reshot endings. However, Powell’s performance is strangely magnetic, in large part because it feels like a surprisingly brave performance in a film like this.

The Running Man is most interesting as a paving stone of Glen Powell’s path through contemporary Hollywood, as an actor who seems like he was born to be a movie star but seems deeply ambivalent and conflicted about what that actually means. Powell’s movie stardom seems built on a deep cynicism about the very idea of movie stardom. It’s hard to know if this can be a solid foundation for a movie star career, but it is a bold choice nonetheless.