The Running Man: A giddy, violent sprint

The Running Man (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for extreme violence, gore and profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.16.25

This Stephen King dystopian nightmare is an evergreen: It can be re-imagined anew for each generation, thanks to changes in technology, geo-political shifts ... and an increased level of hyper-violence.

 

Ben (Glen Powell, left) has serious doubts when Elton (Michael Cera) invites gun-toting
thugs into his home, believing that his many jury-rigged defense systems will save the day.

The 1982 novel — the fourth and final book initially published under King’s “Richard Bachman” pseudonym — initially hit the big screen five years later, with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing protagonist Ben Richards. It’s an acceptable adaptation, although this new version hews more closely to King’s book.

This film also is directed by Richard Wright, whose snarky blend of thrills ’n’ chills has been evident since 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, followed by equally clever (and sometimes mildly deranged) hits such as Hot Fuzz, Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho.

 

Point being, Wright’s sensibilities are spot-on for this angry high-tech parable. Given the current slide into fascism in the United States, and elsewhere in the world, many of the plot points in this adaptation — co-scripted by Wright and Michael Bacall — feel disturbingly conceivable.

 

The time is the near future, the setting a United States where the gap between the Haves and Have-nots has become a yawning chasm. It’s effectively a police state designed to ensure that the lower classes remain that way. Chances for advancement are restricted to participation in demeaning and barbaric televised “reality game shows.”

 

The worst challenge — and therefore the most popular — is The Running Man, where “contestants” try to stay alive for 30 days, while being hunted by professional gun-toting pursuers. Contestants also must be wary of their fellow citizens, who earn rewards for identifying or even killing them. The longer a contestant survives, the more s/he earns in “new dollars” (with, as a droll inside joke, Schwarzenegger’s photo in the center of each bill).

 

Ben Richards (Glen Powell) lives with his family in a poverty-level district dubbed Slumside. As the story beings, he simply wants work. His infant daughter is quite ill, and his wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) is exhausted, working multiple shifts as a “hostess” in an upscale club. Ben has lost numerous jobs: branded as chronically insubordinate for his tendency to selflessly assist fellow employees who need help (apparently a no-no in this society).

 

Production designer Marcus Rowland, cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung and a massive sfx crew bring this oppressive futuristic society to persuasively chilling life. (Shades of Blade Runner!)

The Book of Henry: A fascinating read

The Book of Henry (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.16.17

Films don’t surprise me much any more.

This one did.

The Book of Henry is a captivating convergence of premise, cast and execution: a beguiling “little” drama filled with big ideas, carefully shepherded by a director and writer who maintain unerring control throughout.

While Mom's away, the boys will play: Armed with a vacuum cleaner, toilet plungers,
goggles and gallons of packing "peanuts," Henry (Jaeden Lieberher, left) does his best
to put a smile on the face of younger brother Peter (Jacob Tremblay).

Trust is in short supply these days, from all sorts of quarters. It seems like people and things too frequently disappoint us, and that’s equally true of films that betray our faith and intelligence. Not so The Book of Henry. Barely half an hour in, it became clear that scripter Gregg Hurwitz wasn’t going to miss a step with his enchanting narrative, and that director Colin Trevorrow’s guiding hand would monitor all the elements with the precision of the Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions concocted by the story’s title character.

In short, I gave my trust to Hurwitz and Trevorrow, and they didn’t let me down.

Eleven-year-old Henry (Jaeden Lieberher) shares a bedroom with his younger brother Peter (Jacob Tremblay) in a pastoral suburban town in upstate New York. Their mother Susan (Naomi Watts), a single parent, toils as a waitress at a tiny diner, alongside co-waitress and feisty family friend Sheila (Sarah Silverman).

Susan is forgetful, immature and only mildly educated: still stuck in post-adolescence, all these years later, and more big sister than parent. The preternaturally serious Henry, in stark contrast, has the family well in hand; he’s charismatic, shrewdly intuitive and super-smart. (He prefers the term “precocious.”)

On a typical weekday evening, Susan spends hours playing video games; Henry sits quietly at a table, paying all the bills and keeping an eye on the stock market.

He also keeps an eye on Christina (Maddie Ziegler), the girl next door who sits at an adjacent desk in his classroom. Normally a friendly, cheerful lass, of late she has grown quiet and withdrawn, frequently half-concealing her face beneath her hair. Her step-father Glenn (Dean Norris) — also a single parent, and the local police chief — seems ... well ... tightly wound.

All three kids are creative. Christina dances; Henry and Peter spend lots of time in their tree house, in the woods behind their home. This kids’ heaven has been assembled from all manner of found materials — no doubt engineered by Henry — and filled with toys, gadgets and discarded junk waiting to be transformed into something spectacular. Best touch: the tree house entrance is a re-purposed refrigerator door, complete with bottles held within its shelves.

The Hobbit, The Battle of the Five Armies: At long last, the grand finale!

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for intense fantasy action violence and some truly scary monsters
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.19.14

Peter Jackson certainly knows how to stage a spectacle.

He’d have had a great time during Hollywood’s Golden Age, choreographing the fabled casts of thousands.

As a massive battle between elves, dwarves, humans and nasty orcs rages about them,
Gandalf (Ian McKellen, left) and Bard (Luke Evans) realize that the ghastly orc armies are
being directed by the orc lord Azog the Defiler, standing on a nearby hilltop. Clearly, he
must be stopped ... but how?

That said, he has become a poor judge of narrative structure. Although this final installment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit builds to a rousing, suspenseful, crowd-pleasing climax, this cinematic saga definitely didn’t deserve the three-part presentation that seems to have been dictated entirely by commerce.

Consider the irony: We couldn’t get enough of Jackson’s three-part adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and fans eagerly snapped up the extended-edition DVDs, to savor all the additional scenes left on the cutting-room floor. That adulation was entirely warranted, because those three books are extremely dense.

But The Hobbit lacks that complexity; it’s a shorter, single book, and — more significantly — is aimed at a much younger audience. Granted, Jackson and his fellow scripters — Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and horror maestro Guillermo del Toro — drew from the 125 pages of notes and appendices included with modern editions of The Lord of the Ring ... but, even so, this newest trilogy has suffered from bloat since its first installment. (I still haven’t recovered from the slapstick, Disney-esque dwarf songs in Bilbo’s dining room.)

Although the major plot points have been impressively realized, there’s a definite sense of treading water along the way, and extraneous characters we’d be better off without. Notable case in point: the Master of Laketown (Stephen Fry) and his weaselly aide (Mikael Persbrandt), who popped up in the middle installment and return here. They’re no more than stunt casting, particularly in Fry’s case, and their characters seem to have wandered in from a Blackadder installment. Very poor judgment, on Jackson’s part.

More disappointing, though, is the fact that — in this third and final installment — Martin Freeman’s Bilbo Baggins has become a bystander in his own story. That’s a shame on all sorts of levels, not the least of which is the lessened degree to which we’re able to enjoy Freeman’s marvelously subtle performance. I just love the way he twitches his nose, or starts to say something, checks himself, and then decides that silence is the better part of wisdom.

Freeman gets more mileage out of Bilbo’s double-take decisions not to speak, than many of these supporting characters deliver via pages of dialogue.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Droll sci-fi hijinks

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for intense sci-fi action and violence, and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.1.14

Call this one Marvel Lite.

The newest chapter in this comics-to-film universe has the playful atmosphere of Josh Whedon’s Firefly or George Lucas’ Star Wars saga, complete with a group of rag-tag sorta-heroes led by a tousled, good ol’ boy who feels like a blend between Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Although Earth-based to one significant degree, most of the action takes place in a galaxy far, far away, with a looming threat to an entire planet and its sizable population.

When it comes time to bust out of a celestial prison, our misfit heroes — clockwise from top
left, Quill (Chris Pratt), Groot, Drax (Dave Bautista), Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Rocket
Raccoon — reluctantly set aside interpersonal squabbles in order to work together. Note,
however, that working together successfully is an entirely different matter...

But the danger lies not from a Death Star-like weapon, but instead from a supremely powerful alien entity known only as Thanos, who likely will be watching next summer, when Iron Man, Captain America and the rest of the Avengers battle a Big Bad dubbed Ultron.

Meanwhile, the formidable Thanos serves here as puppet master, sending malevolent minions to do his bidding. Which they do, with cheerfully evil glee.

But that’s getting ahead of things; we first must submit to necessary back-story courtesy of scripters James Gunn (who also directs) and Nicole Perlman, who have a good sense of the scruffy, well-worn universe concocted in the 2008 comic book series by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. Gunn and Perlman haven’t used quite all of the characters employed by Abnett and Lanning in their misfit not-quite-a-team, but the quintet on hand here certainly satisfies.

Things begin with Earth-born Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), whose presence in these distant reaches of the universe remains a mystery for another time (and the obligatory sequel). Quill, a smuggler and thief, conducts his heists while hoppin’ and boppin’ to a carefully preserved mix tape of “awesome hits” made by his mother, back before she died, and played on his carefully preserved Walkman. (Cue the first of this soundtrack’s many 1970s and ’80s rockers and power anthems. You’ll want the soundtrack.)

Quill’s current contract takes him to the dead and deserted planet of Morag, where he finds a strange metal orb also coveted by Korath (Djimon Hounsou), an associate of Ronan (Lee Pace), hired by the aforementioned Thanos. The fast-talking Quill manages to escape with his prize, only to irritate both his own boss — the blue-skinned Yondu Udonta (Michael Rooker) — and the green-skinned assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana), another of Ronan’s emissaries, who tries to snatch the orb herself.

This skirmish takes place on the sumptuous, impeccably civilized world of Xandar, where bounty hunters Rocket and Groot are just as eager to catch Quill and collect the reward on his head. Unfortunately, the escalating fracas results in all four being arrested and sent to a massive space prison known as the Kyln.

Relations between our protagonists are tense at best. The hot-tempered Rocket — a genetically altered, cybernetically enhanced talking raccoon — wants nothing to do with these two-legged beings, unless a reward is involved; Quill just wants to escape with the orb, while Gamora has her own plans for that same device. Worse yet, The Kyln’s many prisoners include Drax (wrestling star Dave Bautista), a quiet but massive brute who blames Ronan for the death of his wife and child, and therefore yearns to rip Gamora to shreds, simply for being in the villain’s employ.

Ah, but is she actually in Ronan’s service? In truth, Gamora may have redemptive plans of her own.

The Hobbit, The Desolation of Smaug: More Middle-Earth magic

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, for intense fantasy action violence and frightening images
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.13.13

Let’s get the important stuff out of the way.

Yes, Orlando Bloom’s Legolas makes a vibrant return during this second chapter in director Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, under circumstances that will raise the eyebrows of J.R.R. Tolkien purists. No matter; It’s hard to complain when Jackson and co-scripters Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Guillermo del Toro integrate this fan-favorite character with such verve.

As Thorin (Richard Armitage, right) explains what Bilbo (Martin Freeman, left) is to do,
once he gets inside the Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor, the little hobbit finally, truly realizes
the danger involved. How in the world will he be able to find a single magical gem, amid
a veritable mountain of treasure, without disturbing the ferocious dragon rumored to
sleep beneath all that gold?

We’ve not seen swash so well buckled since the 1987 adaptation of William Goldman’s The Princess Bride.

On the other hand, there’s nary a glimmer of the brooding, owl-eyed Gollum, not even a whispered “My precious” in the soundtrack. The gnarly, nasty little goblin is sorely missed, but — again — it’s hard to complain when his place has been taken by the largest, most impressive fire-breathing dragon ever brought to the big screen. (That would be Smaug.)

Jackson’s Tolkien films never do things in a small way, and that continues to be true here. You’ll once again be amazed by the size and scope of these many settings, whether the forest community of the Wood-elves, or the immense underground Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor, deep within Lonely Mountain.

Production designer Dan Hennah continues to have a field day with details large and small, aided and abetted by visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri and the army of talented artists at Weta Digital. The finished work is seamless; it’s truly impossible to determine where physical set design leaves off, and the computer-enhanced magic takes over.

We truly live in an age of cinematic wonder, to see a book this vividly, imaginatively rich brought so successfully to the big screen.

Acting verisimilitude also plays a major role, of course, and Martin Freeman remains the pluperfect hobbit: His Bilbo Baggins experiences (endures?) one of the best character arcs in fantasy fiction. No longer frightened by his own shadow, Bilbo has found his courage but also carries an increasingly dangerous secret: the powerful golden ring that grants its wearer invisibility, while inexorably sucking the soul from that same owner.

Freeman’s Bilbo spends much of this story at war with himself: all too aware of the psychic damage he’s enduring, and yet forced — by increasingly dangerous circumstances — to don the ring again, and again, and again.

Alternatively, Freeman is equally precise with comic timing, as with Bilbo’s fiddly hands and suddenly stricken expression, having engineered a perfect getaway plan for his dwarf friends, when he realizes that he has no means of escape. Despite the scene’s tension, we can’t help but laugh. That’s clever writing, deft direction and subtle acting.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day: Absolutely delightful

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008) • View trailer for Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for plenty of innuendo and fleeing nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.13.08
Buy DVD: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

One impeccably timed performance in a comedy is a treasure.

Two are a revelation.


After being dragged along to a high-society fashion show, the still shabbily
dressed Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand, left) -- painfully aware of
how much she doesn't fit these surroundings -- wonders how much longer she
can pull off her charade as "social secretary" to irrepressible American singer
Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams).


Watching Frances McDormand and Amy Adams spar in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is akin to sitting courtside during a fast-paced tennis match between champions: Both actresses work their considerable talents to the max, as if each scene were a competition.

But there are no losers here, and we viewers are the winners: This cleverly retro farce is delightful from start to finish, and you'll not be able to take your eyes off McDormand or Adams. Indeed, when both share the screen — which happens quite frequently — it's difficult to know who to watch. Both spice their performances with carefully composed body English and hilarious little bits of business: a tilt of the head here, a calculated pause and raised eyebrow there.

To borrow from a Cole Porter song that'd be right at home in this environment, the result is de-lovely.

Although feeling very much like a transplanted stage comedy, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day actually is based on a 1938 novel by Winifred Watson, a British author whose sexually charged book — no doubt a revelation for forward-thinking women of her day — must've raised more than a few eyebrows. The novel is practically a blueprint for a pre-WWII Hollywood screwball comedy, and I'm amazed it hasn't been adapted until now.

Director Bharat Nalluri — a veteran of recent, top-notch British TV shows such as Spooks, Hustle and Life on Mars — embraces the material as though born to the genre. Working from a finely tuned script by David Magee (Finding Neverland) and Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty), Nalluri guides his talented cast through a fast-paced adult fairy tale that balances its witty dialogue and hilarious plot complications with the real menace of England's impending war with Germany.

Composer Paul Englishby delivers a rollicking, jazz-hued soundtrack that perfectly evokes the era; the result — very much in the mold of Anne Dudley's main theme to the beloved British TV series, Jeeves and Wooster — saucily punctuates this naughty mix of ethical dilemmas and bedroom hijinks.

The story takes place in 1939 London, on the eve of what savvy citizens know is the ramp-up to another nightmare. Times are hard, emotions are high, and jobs are hard to come by; the stuffy gatekeeper at an employment agency therefore is disinclined to help when middle-age governess Guinevere Pettigrew (McDormand) is sacked from yet another placement.