The pun-packed, Arnie-starring original that strayed wildly from Stephen King’s book is one trashy 80s sci-fi romp that could actually benefit from a remake
Why bother remaking much-loved 80s and 90s science fiction movies? Frankly it never ends well. Len Wiseman’s 2012 reworking of Total Recall, with a baffled-looking Colin Farrell taking over from Arnold Schwarzenegger as the amnesiac dreamer of futuristic secret agent dreams, struggled to capture the bombast of the superbly trashy Paul Verhoeven original, and never even made it to mutant-heavy Mars. The maverick Dutch director’s 1987 version of RoboCop is a gloriously effective corporate satire masquerading as an all-guns-blazing actioner, but its 2014 remake from José Padilha (despite a stellar cast) seemed to smooth off all those rough, wonderfully stop-motion fuelled sci-fi edges and somehow lose something in the process.
How, then, should we greet the news that another of Arnie’s nutty sci-fi romps, 1987’s The Running Man, is to get the remake treatment? It really ought to be a fresh excuse to chew on one’s own kidneys at the horrifying banality of Hollywood in 2024, but there is something about the prospect of a fresh visit to dystopian future Los Angeles that feels surprisingly hopeful.
