Issue #93: Monsters and Mayhem 👹🧌

We’re rolling (sliding? slumping? “eyeing the dead weeks at the end of the year”?) into the final bits of 2025, and we’re coming back to your inboxes with two very different EOY viewings: First, we’ve got Zosha getting real mad about The Running Man and the state of what blockbusters think they owe to us. Then we’ve got Cate on Marty Supreme, a film out of time.

There’s a lot to be mad about these days. I won’t list them all here; my blood pressure’s not bad, and I’d like to keep it that way. But you know the vibe. It’s hard to escape, really! It’s easy to take for granted, to have to put aside the fact that we’re all stewing in some societal rot and it feels like there’s increasingly little to do about it. And that’s just one reason I hated The Running Man so fucking much. 

The adaptation of the 1982 Stephen King novel by Edgar Wright and Michael Bacall is all-in-all pretty faithful to the story people know (either from the book or the 1980s Schwarzenegger movie): A near-future United States is run by an authoritarian media network. Ben Richards (Glenn Powell) lives at the bottom of the societal ladder, amidst some of the worst poverty and violence his great nation has to offer. His only way out, and to get medicine for his little girl, is to compete on one of several of the network’s reality shows—and unfortunately he’s picked for the most violent one, “The Running Man.” 

King’s work isn’t batting 1000 these days, but generally his stories center on something genuinely felt—failure, fear, hope. Whether the story works on the whole is sometimes less important (or at least interesting) than what it actually is orbiting around. The Running Man, as a film, wants to cash in on the anger of this era of King, flung outwards in the story virtuously towards a corrupted world. But it can’t connect to anything, not really anyway. It’s a script overburdened with exposition and telling us things. Neither of these is a mortal sin, but there’s not much to back it up. 

You would think that having 30 days to live on the lam and try to outrun the law would give The Running Man a way to build a broader world. Instead it feels like the true dregs of sci-fi action, with little rendered beyond what’s absolutely necessary. As Ben tries to keep his life and win a prize pot of $1 billion, the worldview seems to shrink, becoming simpler with every turn and every dollar awarded. 

In a time when “the system” feels so profoundly stacked against you and the market is saturated with anti-rich narratives, The Running Man should be able to take a bunch of things for granted to keep the story going. Instead everything just feels like it’s been shortcut one too many times, cutting out the mortar of the story and rendering it a bit inert. Ben, as a character, seems more full of bluster than righteous fury. Powell’s an odd fit in the role—he, of course, makes sense as a person you can’t help but be charmed by. But there’s not really a sense of fury being channeled. We’re constantly told that Ben is angry, so angry he’s known for flying off the handle against the system, the unjustness, his boss. But, even in a world that apparently actively punishes people who help others, it never really translates. Ben Richards feels like the guy at the bar who tells you you better watch yourself and goes back to grumpily nursing a beer. We’re being beaten over the head with an identity that doesn’t ever seem to be there. 

Running Man’s characterlessness extends far past Powell, though. When Wright first appeared on the scene he felt exciting, kinetic. His style was playful and readily apparent, confidently energizing familiar stories and allowing for slick setpieces, great gags, and brutal action. The Running Man, by comparison, feels anonymous. There’s no endorphin rush, and even at its peak action it’s devoid of any adrenaline. Had I walked in totally unknowing, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you who directed it; there’s nothing that merits mention beyond how unspecific and rote it all is. 

Running Man feels at once geared to the moment with its rage and a bit out of step (even with Beast Wars season 2 on the way, cruel reality shows isn’t exactly zeroing in on the zeitgeist). But if you take it at its word, it’s a movie that wants us to remember our power, to be brave enough to be good even when the world offers no incentive for it. It’s not often adept at balancing its many tones, but it’s clear-eyed about how hard it is to take a stand. And then it just… whiffs it! Sells out its heart for an ending that can put a neat bow on the idea. For most of the movie I feared it’d just be overwritten; ultimately it couldn’t even commit to the revolutionary ideas I spent so much time being told about. There’s a sense that this is the ending we deserve, somewhere where comeuppance is gotten and justice is served. But it’s a cowardly way to do it, and an empty-headed one to boot. I guess I’ll just take the laugh—after all, there’s really too much to be mad about. 

Marty Supreme is a very good movie. 

Anchored by the best performance of Timothée Chalamet’s career, it follows an ambitious, reluctant shoes salesman, determined to make his name by becoming the international table tennis champion. He is driven only by this goal, and every action he takes is in service of his single-minded belief in this self-appointed purpose. 

If you’ve seen and enjoyed 2019’s Uncut Gems, then director Josh Safdie’s first solo effort in nearly two decades will feel familiar. Propelled by that film’s signature relentless anxiety, Marty Supreme shifts its focus from the external to the internal. Where Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner is driven by his insatiable addiction to sports gambling, Chalamet’s Marty Mauser is driven by the endless spark of his own self-regard. 

The fruits of Safdie’s long career are on full display. His attention to detail — in particular the cinematography, production design of 1950s New York, and its culturally dense Jewish enclaves — emphasizes Marty’s own particularities. He is the worst kind of narcissist. It isn’t just that he thinks his needs, wants and goals take priority over everyone else’s. It’s that his belief borders on delusion — he isn’t selfish so much as he is brainwashed by his own self-confidence. 

Marty is such a detestable character that the film largely lives or dies on Chalamet’s genuinely excellent and fully embodied performance. He doesn’t make Marty likeable, merely identifiable, powering through the film with an endless appetite for Marty’s many contours. There is no character in the film who isn’t left worse off by an encounter with him. And Marty’s dismissive attitude to the harm he causes is the pebble that troubles the shoe long after the film is over. Because while this isn’t a sports film in the traditional sense, it very much uses the framework of the expected sports narrative to guide viewers to an inevitable conclusion. 

From his dripping condescension to his penchant for saying deeply shocking and offensive things as a form of self-aggrandizement, Marty is a very familiar archetype. Here, it works in service of a character who would usually be the villain in a story like this. Fresh off the heels of WWII, he anoints himself “Hitler’s worst nightmare” in a press interview before a London tournament. Later, he tells an American businessman looking to hire him to perform in Japan that “he doesn’t understand why he’s so eager to impress the people who killed his son.” Marty has the good sense to reluctantly acknowledge how offensive the statement is, but it’s not an apology so much as a reiteration of what he sees as an acceptable tit for tat in the state of play. These choices, none of which he learns from, become the building blocks of the success he insists is due to him. 

And it isn’t that he never suffers consequences. One could argue the only thing he suffers are consequences. But this is also a world in which Marty Mauser never stops getting second chances. “Failing upwards” is a laughably insipid description of what happens over the course of this film. Which makes the film a curious cultural artifact to debut in this particular sociopolitical moment.

I’ve written before about the way our media reflects the values of our time, and Marty Supreme inadvertently supports the thesis. Safdie’s deft hand succeeds in sweeping you up in his protagonist’s dreams. One tournament. One foe. One chance at glory. But what makes this story so compelling is also precisely what makes it so maddening. By the film’s end, Marty has overcome an absurd number of obstacles in order to reach the acclaim he’s so sure he rightly deserves. But backtracking through the plot, it’s immediately clear that every single obstacle he faced was one he in fact created himself. 

Howard Ratner’s inability to hold onto anything of value without upping the ante with another bet is mirrored by Marty’s stubborn insistence that the solution to a failed scam is yet another scam. He bulldozes through the people in his life — his boss and uncle, from whom he steals $700, his mother who he disregards and disrespects, his married girlfriend whose child he refuses to claim, and his best friend Wally, a Black taxi driver whose life he puts in danger. And that’s to say nothing of his other married girlfriend of sorts, Kay Stone (Gwyenth Paltrow) from whom he steals and repeatedly lies to. And her husband, the self-same wealthy businessman he rudely rebuffs gets the same treatment; all for the crime of suggesting that table tennis might be entertaining. 

In a vacuum, all of that is perfectly fine. In fact, it’s the relentlessness of his endlessly compounded reckless behaviour that gives the film its magnetic draw. Marty is someone who doesn’t know how to take no for an answer. He is a whirlwind of chaos. But it irks when all of his anti-social behaviour is in the end, rewarded, in exactly the way his narcissism demands.

Safdie never bothers to engage with the fallout of his protagonist's actions. If it doesn’t affect Marty directly, he isn’t interested in lingering. There’s no indication that he understands that Mary is not the hero. Instead, time after time, his ability to weasel out of untenable situations bolsters him as a clever, ingenious master of his own fate to everyone around him. It’s not a matter of finger-wagging over morality plays, nor should it be. But it’s difficult to tell a story about a genuinely fascinating character like this without understanding their motives as real people. 

The movie is a square shape bumping against the round hole of sports drama conventions. The crafty narrative manipulation of the genre invites audiences to justify and minimize Marty’s behavior. But as with Walter White and Don Draper before him, you aren’t supposed to like him far less root for him. You’re supposed to understand his behaviour as one essential building block of a larger, more considered story.

The entertainment industry is no stranger to white male anti-heroes. It’s practically a genre unto itself. But this film exists in a landscape where the culture is quite literally — as a matter of public policy — insisting that white men are the only ones who matter. And yes, Marty is Jewish, which would undoubtedly have been a major factor in how he was able to move through the world. But when minority voices and storytelling are being wiped from public access, punished for asserting their humanity, and targeted because of their identities, it feels like a stubborn knot in the back to watch the very people responsible for this situation get exactly what they want, no matter how many times they fuck up. No lessons learned, no narrative growth achieved. It’s the same thing that pinches about Pantone’s choice of white for the colour of the year. Or Paul Thomas Anderson working through his previously unexamined experiential distance from his Black wife and mixed-race children in One Battle After Another. As many have opined for reasons big and small, now is not the time.

Marty Supreme is a very good movie. But it’s also a film out of time, and out of step, with the world we’ve all been forced to face.

We all love to look at our Wrapped list but don’t let that get in the way of making your own memories. Look at all these beautiful newsrooms!!!! Pennies are trash now ☹ Inside the race to train AI robots how to act human in the real world.

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Zosha + Cate <3