If you saw the Edgar Wright–Stephen King adaptation The Running Man in the cinema last weekend, with Glen Powell as the eponymous fugitive in a dystopian future, then you were one of the relatively few. The film has flopped at the box office, with audiences resistant to Powell’s charms and Wright’s visual pizzazz, and in a tricky year for King adaptations. It’s not been helped by some idiotic remarks the author made at the time of Charlie Kirk’s assassination; there will probably be fewer big-budget films based on his work in the future.
Yet The Running Man’s failure also suggests that there is a wider issue at hand, and that is the death of the ‘bloke film’. This is a once-lucrative, now endangered sub-genre of films that are primarily, sometimes wholly, aimed at men, often with the intention of being viewed on a Friday and Saturday night at the cinema, in company, after the consumption of a meal and various alcoholic beverages. Some of these pictures are now regarded as classics. Lawrence of Arabia, which had considerable artistic ambitions, qualifies as a bloke film on the grounds that there is not a single female speaking role in its entire four-hour duration. However, some bloke films are, to put it mildly, bilge. Yet for decades, films were made that were designed to keep dad happy, and by and large, it worked.
Today, Hollywood is a more censorious, nervous place, with pictures apparently made by committee, and the idea of films aimed largely at heterosexual white men of a certain age is unlikely. Thirty years ago, there was a run of superb pictures, often starring Nicolas Cage, that were simultaneously thrilling and enormously good fun: one thinks of Crimson Tide, The Rock, Face/Off, Enemy of the State and that ne plus ultra of knowing ludicrousness, Con Air, which answered the question of what would happen if you took a bunch of Juilliard-educated classical actors and put them in an action film that parodied its own silliness as it launched into ever-loopier excess. Not one of these films would be made today. Instead you have watered-down versions of them, like The Running Man, or superhero pictures that are both crass and fearful. Dad will remain at home if that is all he is offered.
It was ironic that one of the all-time great bloke films, in the form of the cheerily un-PC The Wild Geese, was re-released in cinemas last weekend, showing up The Running Man for the bloodless farrago it is. The Wild Geese would never be mistaken for a cinematic classic, but its once-in-a-lifetime cast of Roger Moore and the Richards Harris and Burton (both of whom spent the shoot trying, and failing, to stay off the booze, which can be discerned in their fevered performances) make for an indelibly entertaining experience. It was one of the last gasps of the men-on-a-mission genre, other highlights of which include The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare (Burton again) and The Dirty Dozen. Today, glumness has replaced escapism and drabness has taken the place of fun, and we are all the poorer for it.
Some bloke films are, to put it mildly, bilge
Is everything lost? Well, another picture that came out last weekend, Nuremberg – with Russell Crowe, star of one of the great bloke films, Gladiator, in magnetic form as Hermann Göring – was clearly aimed at a discerning male audience. It’s a welcome throwback to old-school, grandstanding dramas of a kind that have long since migrated to television. This summer’s F1 was a fun spin on the racing-car drama, just as 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick made Tom Cruise cool all over again. And the newly knighted Christopher Nolan seems to be on a one-man mission to reinvent the genre of the bloke film as something more upmarket and cerebral, which he has done to award-winning effect with the likes of Oppenheimer, Dunkirk and next year’s sure-to-be-great The Odyssey.
Yet Nolan is unique in contemporary cinema in that he can do precisely what he wants, and studios fall over themselves to provide the enormous budgets that his visions require. For other film-makers, they are expected to go where the audiences are supposed to be, rather than following their own vision. If this means that mediocre films like The Running Man are aimed at a male audience, those viewers are not going to turn up to see them, meaning in turn that cinema for men will eventually die a slow death. Some may not care too much about this, but for anyone who cares about a genuine diversity of popular entertainment, the absence of bloke films from our screens will be far more missed than the ignorant currently imagine. So let’s get some good old-fashioned escapism into the cinema and lure dad back into the multiplex. He, and everyone else, will be grateful for the treat.
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