50 Days 50 films - #30 "The Running Man" (Paul Michael Glaser)

As a boy child of the 80s, I just knew there was going to have to be at least one Arnold Schwarzenegger movie on this list. So I was all set to write about Paul Verhoeven's 1990 classic "Total Recall" until literally 30 seconds ago when I realized that I was kidding myself. "Total Recall" is probably the better film, but the Schwarzenegger movie I love — and I mean LOVE — is "The Running Man." 

It's the one that I watched over and over and over and OVER again. Hell, I kind of just want to go home and watch it right now.

"The Running Man" is Verhoeven-lite in many ways. It's got all those elements so readily identifiable with his late 80s/mid 90s films — hot chicks, badass action, and a healthy dose of social satire. Some might see this as a negative, might claim that this movie is really nothing but a derivative retread. But for me "The Running Man" took all those crazy Verhoeven elements, chopped them up, threw them into a blender, and made something even more crazy and way more fun.

Let's just list some of the positives here: It's based (very loosely) on a Stephen King novel, which helps. It features the second best line of dialogue in movie history (the best, interestingly, comes from another Schwarzenegger film). It has this scene. It has dance numbers (I couldn't find any video clips, but trust me, they're amazing). It's even got Jesse "The Body" Ventura.

And, come on, any movie that teams up Dweezil Zappa with Mick Fleetwood playing a future cyberpunk version of Mick Fleetwood has just got to be awesome.

The film's absolute stroke of genius was in casting the late Richard Dawson as The Big Bad. To put this in context for all you Millenials out there, Dawson was the host of "The Family Feud." Literally every grandmother in America was in love with that guy. 

In "The Running Man," Dawson chews the scenery like it's made of candy and has a ton of fun sending up his family-friendly image and twisting it into something a little dark and kind of vicious. It's a truly memorable performance that actually manages to elevate this movie at least a little bit beyond the slice of 80s American cheese that it is.

It's too easy to use the word "prescient" when it comes to a film like this. That's one of those buzzwords critics like to use to elevate their guilty pleasures in order to justify being a fan. You hear this a lot about Verhoeven's "RoboCop," as well — and I'm not saying that it's not true on some level. I mean, sure, "The Running Man" did seem to predict the moral dip in our post Cold-War culture that lead to shows like "Survivor" and "Fear Factor," and I'm sure there's an argument to be made paralleling this film's depiction of a fascistic consumerist nightmare to Bush-era America in the years following 9/11.

But I think it's more useful to look at both this film and "RoboCop" as reflections of their own time. Both films were birthed in the wake of cyberpunk, which was an absolute reaction to the Reagan era. Rather than predict the future, what both these films did (and, I would argue, that "The Running Man" did a little bit better) was fashion their bombastic action extravaganzas around a truly Swiftian satire. They took certain disturbing elements of their time in history and pushed them to a level of such extreme absurdity that they became impossible to ignore. 

But whatever. End of the day, this movie is just a ton of fun. It may be the most absolutely batshit Schwarzenegger movie of that or any time. It's compulsively quotable in the way the all best Ah-nuld movies are. People tend to look at it as a minor film in the Austrian giant's...er...ouvre, but I'd say it's definitely worth a reappraisal.

And how can you not love a movie with a scene like this?