The Running Man

"And, just like that, my runnin' days was over." -Eric Roth, Forrest Gump

I almost feel sorry for the super-villains who try it, you know. Sitting in their secret underground base, peeping fearfully out through the letterbox at me as I nonchalantly stroll through the carnage and chaos that was once Glasgow's City Centre with a view to putting an end to their reign of terror by taking their plastic bow and sucker-tipped arrows and breaking them across my knee, it's only natural that they should cast vainly about for something or other with which to repel my admonitory advance. And when their eyes fall with ineffable glee on some unholy artifact, some Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, some 5 for £10 DVD, I can almost sympathise with their belief that it shall function as my own, personal brand of red kryptonite, and can scarcely suppress a hearty, heroic chuckle as I tear it from the quivering fingers which hold it forth like an inverted crucifix and lay grasp to their protuding collar with a "Alright, son, let's be 'aving you." and a frogmarch, sharpish like, off to the chokey. Who'd have thought?

When I was young, you see, I had the good fortune to find myself surrounded by peers of no great intellectual capacity, captained by parents of rather monumental indifference to their children's viewing habits; the end result of which was a semi-daily exposure to ninety minutes bursts of some of the most horrendously awful and low-budget action/horror, and the gradual incrementation of my resistance to bad dialogue, poor make-up and laughable special effects until one day, whilst watching Child's Play 3, I discovered, to my delight, a complete immunity to it. The budget sections of video stores held no terror for me; movie titles comprised of a really cool and really violent thing aligned with another really cool and violent thing left my withers unwrung. Maniac Cop? Ha! Ninja Terminator? HA! Running Man? HA.....? Hey! What's so cool and violent about RUNNING?! Or MEN, for that matter? Had Arnie gone all pretentious on us? Sold-out on his principles, sullied the integrity of his movie niche, wanted to taken seriously as an ac-TOR? Of course he hadn't. The Running Man is paradigmatic Schwarzenegger, a classic of the genre. Simple-minded synonymity of 'futuristic' with 'ugly' and 'violent'; kitsch dialogue delivered with the only face Arnie can do, a straight one; gory, imaginative deaths, easy-to-understand dichotomies of 'right' and 'wrong', a leading actress chosen for no other reason than to make Schwarzenegger's acting look comparatively reasonable, the self-defeating premise of a gratuitously violent and bloody movie decrying gratuitously violent and bloody entertainment- and I ADMIT it, circling vultures, I have seen it on more than one occasion, and even gleaned from it a measure of that slow souldeath that ordinary people are talking about when they refer to 'pleasure'.

You're probably wondering why I'm taking so long to get around to talking about the game itself. Let me tell you right now; the writing of this review has, so far, taken me marginally longer than the completion of the entire game did. The programmers of the game evidently spent 95% of their time and budget on the "Running" part of the game, leaving only a piddling amount for the actual "Man"; every level (and there are only five) consists of running along for a bit, avoiding nothing, jumping nowhere, fighting with no-one until, after some thirty seconds or so, one encounters the end-of-level boss, a Stalker who can only be identified by recourse to one's remembrance of the chronological sequence of the movie, not by his graphical on-screen avatar. Cracking your knuckles and warming up for a good old-fashioned slug-fest, this is where you realise that the producers of the game evidently mistook the premises of the movie and set it not in the gameshows of the future, but in the theme parks of the present. The Stalkers -for some inscrutable reason which may boil down to blind luck on my part but is far more likely to be some kind of technical glitch- are park attendents in funny costumes who simply walk up and down the screen whilst you belt Hell's bells out of them, and make absolutely NO attempt to either defend themselves or offer reprisal to your attacks. The guards who swarm around on the final level seem capable of being goaded into some form of rudimentary self-defence, but only if you hit them whilst they're facing you; the rest of the Stalkers simply do not respond at all, Fireball offering a slight variation on the theme by flying away for a bit before coming back to face your impressive array of [PRESS FIRE AND UP] punch and [PRESS FIRE AND LEFT/RIGHT] kick. Killian himself, when finally you encounter him, actually stands stock-still as you beat him to a poorly-pixelated pulp, presumably transfixed by the awful speed with which you have seen off his imperial elite and penetrated to the very heart of his mass-syndicated sanctum of lies and deceit. But it wasn't the lies and deceit that hurt the most, nor was it the simplistic and irritating puzzle game which passed for an inter-level bonus stage stretching the game's overall longevity from ten to fifteen minutes, nor even the uproariously lamentable sound sample of Arnie's "I'll be back" which kicked the game off, but the execrable fact that, at a price-to-entertainment ratio of around about £1.02 a minute, it had cost you MORE to play the game than it had cost Universal Studios to make the movie. Tossed haphazardly and contemptuously in the corner of the game box, The Running Man, unlike its hero, never did come back; not even, sad to say, in a re-run.