About thirty minutes into the Glen Powell/Edgar Wright remake of “The Running Man” I thought “This is kind of working.” I invested in this updating of Stephen King’s dytopian sci-fi horror for the age of ICE, fascism and murderously amoral media and new star Glen Powell navigating it.

There are jokes connecting the film to the 1987 original. This fascist mediacracy America uses “New Dollars,” and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the last “Running Man,” has his picture on the currency. Wright brings in his “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” star Michael Cera, and there’s a further sop to the fangirls and fanboys in a character who researches, writes and performs a vlog dissecting the infamous race-to-the-death TV show called “The Running Man.”

But the film’s grim tone suggests serious intent, and Wright wrestles with how to manage that messaging throughout. About an hour in, we get the first hints that Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall are scripting themselves into a corner. And upon arriving at that dead end, they focus group themselves right out of topical, allegorical sci-fi thriller and into a finish that’s the least satisfying or logical of the “Sean of the Dead/Hot Fuzz” director’s career.

Powell plays a short-tempered blue collar laborer in this future winner-take-all economy. Ben Richards can’t keep a job, at least partly because of his compassion and sense of responsibility to his fellow workers. His wife (Jayme Lawson) can only take so many extra shifts at The Libertine, a strip club where she insists she just “waits tables.”

And in an America where the working masses are at each other’s throats, the health care system has entered its end game. They’re on their own with a sick toddler and no money to get her “good pharm,” the medicine and medical care that will let her survive the latest iteration of the flu.

The Network isn’t just serving up all manner of “reality” FreeVee TV shows with terminal stakes for the participants. They’re the outsourced supplier of masked “goons” who serve as private police. Some of those goons are the hunters and killers on their most popular show, “The Running Man.”

Ben Richards insists “I’m not stupid enough” to audition for that 30-days-on-the-lam program, whose participants are always hunted down and killed before surviving the full thirty days and collecting the big paycheck. But when Ben shows up, desperate and ill-tempered, for the clearinghouse audition for any of a number of Network game shows, “Running Man” creator/show-runner Dan Killian (Josh Brolin at his toothiest) identifies him as the best prospect for his series, pitched to auditioners as “We’ve got the cash if you’ve got the balls.”

Maybe it was his responses to word association and the holographic Rorschach Tests. “The angriest man to ever audition” is a star in the making, Killian figures.

Ben signs on the dotted line, sends cash home to the wife — who is taken into hiding. And he braces himself for the challenge of running, hiding, disguising and fighting his way past paid thugs and freelance yahoos angling for the rewards the show promises to those who help track Ben, dopey Tim (Martin Herlihy) or their running woman Jenni (Katy O’Brian) down and kill them.

Colman Domingo tries to bring a little Tucci/Elizabeth Banks “Hunger Games” showmanship to the role of MC, the person who whips up the studio audience and viewers at home about how “evil” these “criminals” are that they’re turning loose to be hunted down on TV.

Ben quickly figures out this isn’t on the up-and-up. The Network deep fakes videos, backgrounds and the speeches the hunted “criminals” make and uses any means at its disposal to hunt and stage bloody executions in prime time — once the runners have driven the ratings up — collateral damage be damned.

King came back to this sort of Darwinian contest idea for “The Long Walk,” which was recently filmed. And “The Hunger Games” was just one YA novel series that stole that plot.

Dystopia seems a lot closer to real life than it did when King wrote the book and when Schwarzenegger & Co. first committed it to film. Not sure if that’s a selling point any more than the futuristic slums and legions of neon-lined futurecars mixed in with retrofitted DeLoreans, Citroens and the like we see in the crowded streets. But yes, the production values are first rate.

And there’s something primal about the chase, and “The Running Man” gets us pondering how we’d get out of this or that jam, get away from the D.C./Philly region to New York, Boston and — of course — Derry, Maine, the Capital of Stephen King Country.

Powell may be adept at taking us along for the run, but Brolin at his most sinister is the one who makes the sale. Yes, “entertainment” really could come to this.

Alas, the film’s pacing is stumbling and the longer it goes on, the less urgency we feel in that chase.

There’s little character development, with supporting roles barely sketched in. William H. Macy plays the black market explosives, disguises and weapons dealer/pal that everybody on the lam needs. Daniel Ezra plays the vlogger, with Angelo Gray as the kid brother who talks him into helping this stranger escape the mob and the goons.

And then, as we check our phones or watches for the umpteeth time, we figure that the fellows writing this have no neat, original, satisfying or “true” way of wrapping it all up. The sad part of that is they knew this before we did.

Everything they throw at the screen in the last 12 minutes plays like rewrites, reshoots and a studio badly fumbling what they’d thought was a sure thing way back when they set it up.

Rating: R, graphic violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Glen Powell, Josh Brolin, Jayme Lawson, Daniel Ezra, William H. Macy, Angelo Gray, Michael Cera, Lee Pace and Colman Domingo.

Credits: Directed by Edgar Wright, scripted by Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright, based on a Stephen King novel. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:13