‘The Running Man’ has all the panache you’d expect from Edgar Wright: kinetic editing, sharp needle drops, and a darkly comic edge. But underneath the stylistic flair there’s a strong class commentary about what desperate people will do when the system leaves them with nothing.

Glen Powell plays Ben, an out-of-work man whose baby daughter is seriously ill. Out of options, he signs up for a brutal TV show called The Running Man – a live-broadcast death game in which no contestant has ever survived. In classic Wright fashion, the show launches with a playful, high-energy use of the Spencer Davis Group’s Keep On Running, but the premise is anything but light.

As Ben keeps defying the odds, something unexpected happens: the network realises the longer he lives, the more audiences love him. He becomes a folk hero, and suddenly the producers don’t actually want him to die. There are clear echoes of Peter Finch in ‘Network’ – the “mad prophet of the airwaves” whose breakdown sends ratings soaring while TV executives abandon any pretence of journalistic integrity.

Ben is fundamentally a decent man, yet society frames him as reckless, even criminal. When he stops mid-game to help a fellow contestant having a medical emergency, he’s beaten and told to get to the back of the line. The few people willing to help him – including a lovely little cameo from William H. Macy – can only keep him afloat under borrowed identities for so long.

This is a world where being rich is everything; if you’re not, you’re expendable. It sits firmly in the tradition of Paul Verhoeven’s ‘RoboCop’ – a savage satire of capitalism and media – arguing for basics like healthcare and housing that would be dismissed as “dangerously socialist” by certain politicians. Meanwhile the masses watch, Truman Show-style, cheering and booing on cue, never questioning how their entertainment is being shaped.

At a time when we’re constantly talking about speeches being edited, clips being taken out of context, and AI used to rewrite reality, this feels very prescient. The show’s producers literally manipulate Ben’s words in real time, turning him from folk hero into villain at the touch of a button. Murder as entertainment; outrage as opiate.

The ending is a bit fanciful – one minute Ben is on a plane headed to crash into the studio, the next he’s in disguise, confronting the grinning architect behind the whole machine – but it fits the satirical tone. And there’s a pleasing irony in the fact that the film is itself part of the big money-making system it’s critiquing.

Not every Hollywood blockbuster leans this close to a Marxist treatise – but ‘The Running Man’ manages to be both a propulsive piece of entertainment and a sharp warning about what happens when profit, media and human life all end up in the same rigged game.