Editor's note: A lot happened this week, so here's your chance to get caught up. Read on for the week's most popular headlines.
1. Dallas' Lower Greenville Avenue loses cool Asian restaurant. Dallas' ever-revolving Lower Greenville neighborhood sees another sad restaurant loss in BBBop, the Asian restaurant at 2023 Greenville Ave., which closed on July 13, after three years in that space.
2. Big layoffs at bike-share company prompt total pullout in Dallas. Ofo, one of the big bike-share companies that has been operating in Dallas, is undergoing mass company-wide layoffs, resulting in a far smaller local footprint. The company has chosen to pull out of Dallas entirely.
4. Doug goes on the record: 5 best live-music venues in Dallas-Fort Worth. There are plenty of places to catch live music in DFW, and there's nothing that compares with the spontaneity and good feeling of seeing musicians do their thing live. Here are five favorite DFW music venues.
5. Designer Elaine Turner suddenly closes new Dallas store as company evolves. It’s been a challenging six months for Houston-based designer Elaine Turner, who has had to make difficult business decisions. One of those decisions was to close almost all of her brick-and-mortar stores, including all but one in Dallas-Fort Worth. One Dallas closure was particularly sudden.
Cozy bunk beds offer guests the opportunity to meet other people from all over.
Photo courtesy of Deep Ellum Hostel
Cozy bunk beds offer guests the opportunity to meet other people from all over.
For all its cheesy ‘80s greatness, the original version of The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was a very loose adaptation of the novel by Stephen King. For the new remake, writer/director Edgar Wright has tried to hue much closer to the story laid out in the book, a decision that has both its positive and negative aspects.
Glen Powell takes over for Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards, a family man/hothead who can’t seem to hold a job in the dystopian America in which he lives. Desperate to take care of his family, he applies to be on one of the many game shows fed to the masses that promise riches in exchange for humiliation or worse. Thanks to his temper, Ben is chosen for the most popular one of all, The Running Man, in which contestants must survive 30 days while hunters, as well as the general population, track them down.
Given a 12-hour head start, Ben earns money for every day he survives, as well as every hunter he eliminates. Since he only has a relatively small amount of money to use as he pleases, Ben must rely on friendly citizens who are willing to put their own lives on the line to help him. That’s a task made even more difficult as the gamemakers, led by Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), use advanced AI to manipulate footage of Ben to make him seem like a guy for which no one should root.
Co-written by Michael Bacall, the film is shockingly uninteresting, working neither as an exciting action film, a fun quippy comedy, or social commentary. The biggest problem is that Wright seems to have no interest in developing any of his characters, starting with Ben. Our introduction to the protagonist is him trying to get his job back, a situation for which there is little context even after we’re beaten over the head with exposition.
The situation in which Ben finds himself should be easy to make sympathetic, but Wright and Bacall speed through scenes that might have emphasized that aspect in favor of ones that make the story less personal. The filmmakers really want to showcase the supposed antagonistic relationship between Ben and Dan (and the system which Dan represents), but all that effort results in little drama.
Ben has a number of close calls, and while those scenes are full of action and violence, almost every one of them feels emotionally inert, as if there was nothing at stake. It doesn’t help that Wright doesn’t set the scene well, making it unclear how far Ben has traveled or who/what he’s up against. There are times when Ben feels surrounded and others when he can walk freely, weird for a society that’s supposed to be under almost complete surveillance.
Powell has been touted as a movie star in the making for several years following his turn in Top Gun: Maverick, but he does little here to make that label stick. With no consistent co-star thanks to the structure of the story, he’s required to carry the film, and he just doesn’t have the juice that a true movie star is supposed to have. Nobody else is served well by the scattershot film, including normally reliable people like Brolin, Colman Domingo, Michael Cera, and Lee Pace.
The Running Man is a big misfire by Wright and a blow to Powell’s star power. On the surface, it has all the hallmarks of an action thriller with a side of social commentary, but nothing it does or says lands in any meaningful way. Schwarzenegger’s one-liners in the original film may have been goofy and over-the-top, but at least they made the movie memorable, which is way more than can be said of the remake.
