# Running Man remake **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** movies\ **Created:** [January 8, 2025, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745 "2025-01-08T23:07:21Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Loach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/loach/32/350_2.png) [@Loach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loach)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2025, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/21 "2025-01-10T19:18:04Z")
> [@mozchron](#): > > > [@msmith537](#): > > > > But a more serious movie with serious actors isn’t necessarily “better”. Look at remakes of Total Recall and Robocop as evidence > > For what it’s worth I enjoyed the RoboCop remake. > > > [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > > > Also, who keeps pushing Glen Powell as the next action movie star? > > I don’t know who Glen Powell is (I recognize the name but can’t put a face or a character to it). He’s not built like Aaanold in the 80’s is he? In the book Richards isn’t a body builder - he’s skinny and malnourished and sick (because he’s poor), and only doing it because his daughter is desperately ill. I prefer this version and hope they don’t screw it up. He’s an in shape handsome guy but not built. It won’t be a big problem to play someone poor and skinny. He starred in the recent (remake? sequel?) of _Twister._ He was in _Top Gun 2_ playing the role that took the place of Iceman. He starred in _Devotion_ which deserved to be seen by more people. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2025, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/22 "2025-01-10T19:22:59Z")
He’s still the acting equivalent of a plank of wood. But maybe I’m wrong and he’s actually the next Daniel Day Lewis, hiding his talent up until this dramatic banger of a film. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![mozchron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c2a13f/32.png) [@mozchron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mozchron)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2025, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/23 "2025-01-10T19:35:14Z")
> [@Loach](#): > > He starred in the recent (remake? sequel?) of _Twister._ He was in _Top Gun 2_ playing the role that took the place of Iceman. He starred in _Devotion_ which deserved to be seen by more people Ah. Haven’t seen any of those. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2025, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/24 "2025-01-10T19:49:55Z")
> [@Munch](#): > > > [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > > > Also, who keeps pushing Glen Powell as the next action movie star? He’s a plank of wood, and not even as interesting as knotty pine. > > Oh, I disagree with this. He certainly has been cast in the same role for a number of his movies, but he nails “cocky/smarmy narcissist”. And he shows a bit of range in “Hit Man”. It’s not Oscar worthy or anything, but he’s fun to watch. He’s ok in the rom com **Anyone But You** with Sydney Sweeney where they play two charmless pretty people forced back together at a wedding after a date went badly due to poor communication skills. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2025, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/25 "2025-01-10T20:26:28Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > He’s ok in the rom com **Anyone But You** with Sydney Sweeney where they play two charmless pretty people forced back together at a wedding after a date went badly due to poor communication skills. You are selling him like steaming hot split pea soup on a sweltering summer heat wave. At least throw in an ice cube or two. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2025, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/26 "2025-01-10T22:07:07Z")
Oh so you also read the review in ‘Variety’! ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2025, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/27 "2025-01-10T22:15:11Z")
I think I saw that movie back in the mid-Nineties with…Cameron Diaz and Alicia Silverstone(?), with Dylan Delmonty as the non-descript handsome male lead with a perpetual five o’clock shadow. Or maybe I just imagined it in a fever dream along with Kevin Spacey once being well-regarded as a talented actor who people wanted to work with. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Munch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/munch/32/5281_2.png) [@Munch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Munch)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2025, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/28 "2025-01-11T13:58:40Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > You are selling him like steaming hot split pea soup on a sweltering summer heat wave. At least throw in an ice cube or two. It’s a Much Ado About Nothing adaptation. Sweeney and Powell have plenty of charisma to make it an entertaining watch. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2025, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/29 "2025-01-11T16:50:39Z")
> [@Munch](#): > > It’s a Much Ado About Nothing adaptation. Sweeney and Powell have plenty of charisma to make it an entertaining watch. Well, then I’ll have to give it a watch on a day where I have nothing better to do and the planet is imminently collapsing into a wandering black hole. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2025, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/30 "2025-01-11T18:09:15Z")
To humor you, I watched a few clips of the movie, and without hyperbole I can say that based on those scenes Glenn Powell and Sydney Sweeney are two of the most charisma-deficient actors I have ever seen in a rom-com, albeit not aided by dialogue that wasn’t so much painful as just narratively incoherent and remotely lacking in anything a competent screenwriter would call “humor” but which I sure met some algorithmic definition of the concept. I can hate-watch _How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days_ because even though it is an awful story with narcissistic villains as the protagonists, Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey have genuine chemistry and also know what kind of film they are in so they vamp it up whenever possible to play into what terrible people their characters are. As much as I hate _Love, Actually_ in nearly every possible way, it has a fantastic cast that does everything they can do with the dreck material. And those Nora Ephron comedies that were so popular in the ‘Nineties made me want to scrape the top layer of skin off my entire body after watching, (especially the uber-creepy and badly dated _You’ve Got Mail_) but Ephron could write dialogue that actors like Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (and the underappreciated Parker Posey in a role so fundamentally evil they should have given her a cigarette holder and a fur coat made from Dalmatians) can dine out on all week. [This movie?](https://youtu.be/yTKcHw_wg-4?si=GhVDX4_WQxiMvgkk) It’s evidence that the chatbot and/or aspiring 12 year old writer that generated the screenplay (because there I find it impossible to believe that a professional screenwriter would generate dialogue this terrible as this even if they allowed their name to be put on it) is not ready for prime time, or even public access, and the leads have no native charisma to carry whatever story there is here. It is all the worse for being purportedly based on _Much Ado About Nothing_, but unsurprising because modernized adaptations of Shakespeare comedies often stumble when trying to express the Bard’s wit without his words, and I have a hard time thinking of any Shakespeare-based romantic comedy (other than straight adaptations like Joss Whedon’s 2012 self-financed film using the original text) that have really worked. On the other hand, I eagerly await the days that that the Coen Brothers decide to do an updated retooling of _Hamlet_ or _Macbeth_ because the dark humor in those plays matches their sensibilities so well. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2025, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/31 "2025-01-11T18:46:24Z")
That should have been this clip: [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/2TafOIUjBjs/maxresdefault.jpg "Pretending To Be The "Perfect Couple" | Anyone But You (2023) | Romantic Comedy | Screenfinity") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TafOIUjBjs) > [@msmith537](#): > > Hard Target with JCVD This is my favorite JCVD film! The combination of peak-cocaine Van Damme and John Woo before Hollywood told him to stop doing all the crazy things that they were so excited about when they brought him over the ocean is a testosterone-and-steroid-crazed movie that makes no sense, and Jean-Claude is an even less believable former Force Recon Cajon merchant seaman than he was a was the leader of a 1920s pickpocket gang cum expert Muay Thai fighter. I hope it is steaming somewhere because I’m going to watch it tonight, and the Blockbuster down the street has been closed for, like, forever, man! Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2025, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/32 "2025-01-11T20:58:57Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > Hunger Games > Battle Royale > The Condemned > Gamer > Guns Akimbo > Game Night Game Night? Is that a foreign movie because you can’t mean the Jason Bateman movie as being in this genre? ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2025, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/33 "2025-01-11T21:52:09Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Game Night? Is that a foreign movie because you can’t mean the Jason Bateman movie as being in this genre? Possibly a stretch. But I seemed to remember their game night ended up getting pulled into a real life “murder mystery”. **Ready or Not** might be a better addition to the list. ---
**Author:** ![Sherrerd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sherrerd/32/8_2.png) [@Sherrerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sherrerd)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2025, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/34 "2025-01-11T23:02:15Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > I eagerly await the days that that the Coen Brothers decide to do an updated retooling of _Hamlet_ or _Macbeth_ because the dark humor in those plays matches their sensibilities so well. Those would be great even if they star Glen Powell! More likely: Oscar Isaac and Michael Stuhlbarg. Having forgotten: > **[The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021 film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_Macbeth_(2021_film))** > > The Tragedy of Macbeth is a 2021 American historical thriller film written, directed and produced by Joel Coen, based on the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare. It is the first film directed by one of the Coen brothers without the other's involvement. The film stars Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand (who also produced the film), Bertie Carvel, Alex Hassell, Corey Hawkins, Harry Melling, Kathryn Hunter, and Brendan Gleeson. > The Tragedy of Macbeth premiered at the 2021 New York Film Festiva... Starring Denzel Washington; no role for Mr. Powell. Historical era, not modern re-telling, but its existence may mean the Coens are less-likely to do a modern re-telling. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2025, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/35 "2025-01-11T23:10:11Z")
> [@Sherrerd](#): > > Oscar Isaac and Michael Stuhlbarg. Both are lamentably too old for the role of Hamlet but Oscar Isaac would make a fantastic Macbeth. I’d have to think about Stuhlbarg; his most obvious casting would be as Shylock in _The Merchant of Venice_ but I feel he’s got enough range to do a lot of things, especially the other ‘problem plays’. I have a fondness for _Measure for Measure_, so maybe the Duke. > [@Sherrerd](#): > > Having forgotten: > > [The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021 film) - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_Macbeth_(2021_film)) I didn’t even know about this (haven’t been following movie release since the pandemic and don’t have Apple+) but I’ll have to check this out! Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Sherrerd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sherrerd/32/8_2.png) [@Sherrerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sherrerd)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2025, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/36 "2025-01-12T20:35:27Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > I have a fondness for _Measure for Measure_, so maybe the Duke. He might even be better as Angelo. But yes, OI would be a great candidate to play Macbeth. (Denzel Washington is all very well–a national treasure in his way. But OI is the more subtle actor.) In re “Running Man”—I don’t see at this moment how they’re going to make the _"corrupt culture idolizing cheap reality stars_" point, again. It may have been freshly snarky and trenchant back in 1987. Now, it’s just our reality. ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2025, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/37 "2025-01-12T21:49:49Z")
> [@Sherrerd](#): > > In re “Running Man”—I don’t see at this moment how they’re going to make the _"corrupt culture idolizing cheap reality stars_" point, again. It may have been freshly snarky and trenchant back in 1987. Now, it’s just our reality. It doesn’t have to be fresh to make a good point. Maybe showcase the difference between the reality of who Richards is compared to what the media makes him to be? In the book, Richards is required to sent videos of himself via mail which the network then broadcasts. In some of those videos, Richards tries talking about the network and they simply dub over his voice so his message never gets out there. From what we’ve heard from people who were on reality shows, the producers very often create a narrative that is anything but real, and in the process make heroes and villains for the sake of ratings. ---
**Author:** ![planetcory](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/planetcory/32/1032_2.png) [@planetcory](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/planetcory)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2025, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/38 "2025-01-12T23:06:36Z")
I enjoyed them both. Were they _‘better’_ than the originals? Maybe not. But, on their own merits, I had a good time. Cheesy 80s/90s action hasn’t aged well for me, so that removed any nostalgic objections I might have had. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2025, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/39 "2025-01-12T23:29:19Z")
Released November 2025… What genre are they going to choose, dystopian science fiction or documentary? 😉 ☹ ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2025, 11:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745/40 "2025-01-12T23:31:44Z")
Isn’t Hungar Games basically the same idea? The first film is pretty good. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/running-man-remake/1012745.md?page=3)