Overrated

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Fresh and Exciting

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

"Night of the Running Man" opens with a real "grabber" of an opening, as likable cab driver (Andrew McCarthy) unintentionally gets involved with a fare who has a bag of money stolen from the mob. When the bag guy is killed, McCarthy decides to run with the bag. Enter Scott Glenn as an arrogant "fixer', who is sent by the head boss (Wayne Newton) to retrieve the million dollars and eliminate the cab driver. Glenn is excellent as the somewhat paranoid, darkly sadistic, methodical hunter. Along the way, John Glover becomes a colorful accomplice of Glenn's. This film has excellent character development, a compelling story, a sympathetic hero, and is unpredictable. Highly recommended. - MERK

If you're a movie nut like me you often comb the lower rungs of video stores looking for neglected gems from bygone eras: Rolling Thunder and The Outfit from the 70s. Cohen & Tate and The Hit from the 1980s. And this one from the mid-90s. It has a plot line that I find hard to resist: "Regular guy finds a pile of money and Complications ensue."The Night of The Running Man is a lot of fun. It has great performances from Scott Glenn and John Glover and also from Andrew McCarthy. There are some excruciatingly painful to watch moments in this film,scenes that rival the infamous tooth-drilling scene in Marathon Man, scenes where characters have their feet submerged in boiling water,have their necks broken,foreheads smacked with boards thru which nails are protruding, etc etc. All of the scenes with Scott Glenn have a nasty energy. He is an iconic looking,leathery-faced actor and I would love to see him get more flashy roles such as his part here as a vengeful and greedy hit man. He commands the screen whenever he appears and he isn't afraid to play a completely unlikable character in a very straightforward way. There are no cute actor tricks--playing to the gallery and softening the role. He comes across as very believably scary.The film was directed by Mark Lester and he keeps things moving nicely.This one is worth checking out.

SPOILERS.Unprepossessing cabbie finds himself in possession of one million bucks skimmed from a Vegas casino. An icy killer is called in by the organization to track him down and there follows tense little game of hide and seek that leads to Salt Lake City, with killer (Glenn) only two steps behind the cabbie who is by this time a nervous shambles. Another organization killer in brought into the picture, this time a friendly, matter-of-fact, guy with a sense of humor (Glover). Glover takes the cabbie to his own home, ties him up, and gleefully boils his feet until they are lobster red. Cabbie escapes again, winds up in a hospital, the same hospital that Glover finds himself in. There is a meeting between Glenn and Glover, the two professionals, in which Glover comes up with something out of a B Western -- "Someday the two of us will have to find out which of us is better." I know that it's dumb, but it doesn't leap out at the view because so far the entire movie is pretty dumb. For instance, the cabbie (McCarthy) is stupid for telling a friendly waitress exactly where he's going and how. When the waitress accidentally runs into Glenn she's dumb for not simply denying she met McCarthy but also for lying about where he's headed. (She gets offed in a spectacular fashion for suffering from terminal dumbness.) Then we have McCarthy in hospital with his braised feet being treated by a Barbie Doll of a blonde nurse who falls for him for no discernible reason. She helps him escape (again) takes him and his million bucks to her home and he's sufficiently recovered to be able to make strenuous love although, admittedly, this doesn't require him to spend much time on his feet. Lucky for that, because by any reasonable standards they must be the size of watermelons by now.I hope you're following this because there's going to be a quiz. A final attempt an escape fails and the four principals are brought together -- Glenn, Glover, McCarthy and Barbie. Glenn plugs Glover, proving he's the "better" of the two according to some indecipherable code. Glenn gets his just desserts though. Just as he is about to slice off McCarthy's head, McCarthy whacks him in the forehead with a light board that happens to have a longish nail sticking out of it, thus administering the lobotomy that is long overdue. Glenn mutters a few ironic words, then dies, which is just as well because with all that frontal lobe damage he'd never be able to plan far enough ahead to decide what kind of pizza to order.McCarthy and Barbie now have not only the million bucks but two dead bodies, which they destroy in a fire, leaving the organization to think that the bodies are their own, rather than the killers'. It reminds me a lot of Don Siegel's "Charlie Varrick," but without any grace notes whatever. The motives are weak and not believable. Except for Glenn and Glover, the characters held no interest for me. I didn't want to see McCarthy get killed, of course, because he's an ordinary guy, although to be sure than million dollars doesn't belong to him. And Barbie is unimpeachable. I wouldn't like to see her killed even if she were evil personified. I was also sorry to see Glover get it. What a terrific ham. But Seagal's movie is much more fun.

I saw this movie probably 2 or 3 years ago on cable and have to say that I enjoyed it. The movie begins with a Las Vegas cab driver finding a briefcase stuffed full of money. He thinks he's got it good until he realizes that a relentless hitman is after him and will stop at nothing to recover the money and dispose of McCarthy. Good action scenes and scenery.