It’s been a surprisingly busy autumn at the multiplex for novelist Richard Bachman. There are only a handful of books credited to the pen name dreamed up by Stephen King in the latter half of the nineteen-seventies after the prolific author was told by his publishers that there were limits on how much material he could lob out into the marketplace, and yet two of them have made their way to the screen in recent months. Director Francis Lawrence presided over a largely successful adaptation of The Long Walk, first published in 1979. That movie outpaced its flaws by concerted deeply and earnestly on character. Lawrence and his collaborators homed in on the humanity that is always fiercely present in King’s storytelling. The Running Man, directed by Edgar Wright, stumbles badly because it takes the opposite approach.

The novel The Running Man came out in 1982, and it depicted a dystopian future of grotesque income inequality that was exploited by the entertainment industry for garishly cruel televised spectacles. Among them is a show called The Running Man, in which contestants are given thirty days to avoid assassins hunting them with civilian encouragement, all for the promise of a gigantic cash prize that can rescue them and their family from whatever dire circumstances they endure. In the dawning days of Ronald Reagan’s America, the concept read as a angry satire; these days, it’s probably not that far off from a legitimate pitch that could get Larry and David Ellison to sign a producer to a longterm deal.

Famously adapted into an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle in 1987, this new version of The Running Man casts Glen Powell in the lead role of Ben Richards, a hothead whose history of getting bounced out of jobs has led him to the point where his only viable option is to throw himself at the mercy of the monolithic broadcast network that recruits the desperate to appear in their game shows built on lucrative humiliations. Richards is cast in the deadliest show of them all, which he resists until a serpentine executive (Josh Brolin) cajoles him into it.

The screenplay is co-credited to Wright and Michael Bacall, his partner on the excellent Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. It’s packed with half-baked ideas. Sometimes the film plays as farce and sometimes as earnest commentary. Richards is presented as a wily everyman, a hapless blunderer, or a tenacious bulldog, depending on what is most beneficial for the scenario at hand. He briefly takes on guises to avoid his pursuers, which comes across as something vaguely thrown in because Powell recently proved adept at such playful character work in the far superior Richard Linklater film Hit Man. Other actors flit in and out with shells of characters — Michael Cera as a sardonic survivalist, Emilia Jones as a young woman confronted by her own privilege, and Colman Domingo as the show’s preening host — and none of them stick. It’s a film of nothing but throwaways.

In previous films, Edgar Wright has been able to overcome occasional plot and thematic messiness with the skill of his directing. That’s not the case here. With rare exceptions — such as a scene involving an attempt to help Ben escape by smuggling him out of the city in a car’s trunk — Wright crafts a confusing muddle of a film. The delight in cinematic possibility that has animated Wright’s other films is replaced here by a weary submission to the clanging machinery of blockbuster tepidness. The Running Man flails and goes nowhere.