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Imagine a cross between Rollerball, The Most Dangerous Game, and the worst excesses of TV game shows. That's The Running Man, a big-budget action thriller that allowed Arnold to return to the science-fiction genre. He played Ben Richards, a policeman wrongly accused of murdering 1,500 innocent people in the totalitarian state that America has become in the year 2019. Ben is imprisoned but manages to escape with pals Laughlin (Yaphet Kotto) and Weiss (Marvin J. McIntire). The trio finds refuge with the underground resistance movement led by a father and son team (Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa). His friends join the movement, but Ben's only goal is to find his brother and escape the city. In his brother's apartment, he finds a new tenant, Amber Mendez (Maria Conchita Alonso), a jingle writer for the all-powerful state television network. Amber becomes an unwilling participant in Ben's escape effort.

Unfortunately, Ben is captured and, like other convicts, is forced to participate in a popular televised game show that makes sport out of the unarmed contestants race against time - and against a select group of athletic, highly trained assassins. This fearsome group Jim Brown, Toru Tanaka, Erland Van Lidth, and Gus Rethwisch) is called "the Stalkers." They're a well-armed bunch, equipped with flame throwers, electric saws, and razor-edged hockey sticks. Ben's race, then, is for nothing less than his survival.

The state-controlled media has turned Ben into a notorious, highly visible figure. His participation in the game show is the idea of the show's ratings crazed emcee, Damon Killian (Richard Dawson). Killian uses Ben's pals and Amber as bait for extra excitement. The game show's futuristic arena - actually a devastated section of L.A. - is where Ben gets to make mincemeat out of his pursuers, but not before he takes the audience on a rollercoaster ride of thrills and chills.

A special treat for action-film fans is the presence of former football great Jim Brown, cast as one of the colorfully costumed game-show assassins. Brown had hit movies in a big way in the mid-1960s and found success as star of "blaxploitation" pictures of the early '70s. His career had sputtered in the intervening years, so audiences welcomed his lively role in The Running Man. The Running Man, based on a novel by Stephen King writing under the nom de plume Richard Bachman, is a hard-edged, futuristic nightmare that won good reviews and respectable box office receipts-more than $30 million. Arnold was spared the critical sneers that had typifyed reaction to many of his earlier films. Adding to the picture's allure was the game-show format that the film adopts, thereby involving the audience in its nasty, exhilarating entertainment. Some critics noted that the film could be perceived as a clever send-up of television and as a sharply cautionary tale about the medium's sinister potential for mind control. But other reviewers, like People's Ralph Novak, wondered about "where the film stops lampooning TV audiences' thirst for vicarious violence and starts exploiting it."

Whether or not The Running Man is exploitative is debatable, but the casting of onetime Family Feud host Richard Dawson as Damon Killian certainly showed a sense of humor. Who better to play an ambitious, hyper- energetic TV star?

Although much praise was lavished on Dawson's witty line readings, Arnold got the biggest laughs. The script's humor is crude but effective, as when Ben uses a buzz saw to rip an antagonist in two, a violent act that causes him to quip, "He had to split!" One-liners of this sort had already become a Schwarzenegger trademark, and audiences ate them up. Once again, Arnold had chosen a vehicle well; The Running Man was his best-received movie since The Terminator.

More importantly, the film solidified Schwarzenegger's status in Hollywood. The hefty $3 million salary he received for the picture couldn't go anywhere but up, and he showed that he could hold his own with talented actors the caliber of Yaphet Kotto and Maria Conchita Alonso. But even in terms of image, The Running Man is significant because it left no doubt as to Arnold's ability to play the underdog - the guy who turns the tables on his oppressors. The approach worked beautifully here, and opened up new avenues for Arnold to explore as a screen star.