Saw The Running Man, a deeply ridiculous but crowd-pleasing film about a deeply ridiculous but crow-pleasing reality TV show where men and women are hunted down for sport. It stars the governator, that Austrian death machine, however so there's no moral ambiguity about the film. This is clearly a bread & circus to keep the public under the sway of a presumably corrupt or otherwise evil dictatorship or something. The nature of the evil of the government is not really plumbed. Instead the TV show is made out to be just as evil as can be. There's even a speech at the end about how television teach us (us the masses) what's cool and uncool, what to eat, drink, and wear.
The whole thing falls a bit flat in an intellectual sense. It feels very protest-y and counter-culture-ish but it doesn't give us anything specific to protest or any bit of culture to be counter to. It makes that little jab about television, but mass media's a pretty easy mark. Also, it suggests nothing as a replacement. It's all very well to tell me to think for myself, but what if I choose (of my own free will) to let TV think for me? Is that not sufficiently for myself? Bah. The film is raging against the machine, but that machine might as well be a traffic light.
Anyway, irrelevant armchair-philosophy aside, the film is entertaining and fun. Arnold's one-liners are tedious but to be expected. It's fun to watch him and his chums struggle through a death maze and the message is an uplifting (if empty) one about casting off fetters and so forth. The AK-47-wielding rebels play a little chillier in these insurgent-riddled times, but the feeling is mostly warm. A silly film, but not a bad one. I was entertained.
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