Runner is in theaters on September 11.
“You come for the king, you better not miss,” says Rodrigo Santoro’s Damian Zaldívar, the no-dimensional chief baddie of the new action/buddy-comedy film Runner. His words are ironic on several levels, not the least of which is because as soon as Zaldívar utters that proclamation, he fires his machine gun… and misses.
But more to the point, Runner feels like a miss, sparked only by some cool action beats and the occasional chuckle elicited by stars Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson in their buddy-not-cop moments.
Ritchson plays Hank Malone, who, when not practicing with his French language app or packing Franco lunches – croque monsieur on Mondays! – works as the “runner” of the title, ensuring the packages of high-priced clients get where they need to go. He’s got all the qualities you could want or expect from an Angel Studios release of this nature – ex-military, reformed alcoholic, tragic past, and Alan Ritchson’s towering form, which comes with a great capacity for murder and mayhem against scummy-looking and anonymous foes.
After a couple of not terribly amusing runner assignments burn off the first 10 minutes of the movie, Hank moves on to the gig that truly sets the film in motion: He’s to escort Wilson’s Ben Bishop, who’s transporting an organ for transplant to a sick little girl named Ellie (Scarlett Crabtree). “Hank is a big guy name,” Ben points out in a barrage of getting-to-know-you lines that immediately put the steely-quiet Hank ill at ease. He just wants to do the job he’s been assigned, the chatty and omnibenevolent Ben wants to make friends along the way, and we as the audience know perfectly well how this formula works. So it’s just a matter of waiting for the sparks between them to kick in, which they sometimes do… when they’re not being interrupted by the rest of the movie.
It’s not that Ritchson and Wilson don’t do the best they can with the material, but the script by Miles Hubley and Tommy White frequently keeps us away from Hank and Ben in order to set up a labored subplot or two over at the hospital, where the sick child’s mom, Kate (Leila George), waits for the organ’s arrival and eventually has to deal with some increasingly ridiculous hijinks. Runner skids to a halt anytime director Scott Waugh (Need for Speed, Expend4bles) cuts away from Hank and Ben to, like, Kate tussling with hospital staff, or Ellie suddenly bleeding from the mouth and being rushed off to the ICU.
Several set-ups wind up feeling undercooked or just don’t get a payoff, such as Hank’s having to fall back on his ex-wife and her new husband for support in the middle of the adventure, or most glaringly, an exotic parakeet that our hero is stuck chaperoning early in the film, only to then hand off for safekeeping to the ex-wife. Wouldn’t Runner be a braver film if it somehow kept the bird in the picture for its full 97 minutes, having to figure out how to balance its action with Hank (and Ben) also having to protect the thing? THE BIRD STAYS IN THE PICTURE, Robert Evans yells from the Great Beyond.
But Runner isn’t very interested in pushing the envelope, and so Santoro’s villain Zaldívar is never more than the “bad guy who shoots his own henchman for screwing up,” the sort of instant screenplay tell that you’ve seen all this before. There’s a potentially interesting dynamic between Zaldívar and his sick mother, as she needs a liver transplant as well, hence the film’s whole premise as Santoro’s character chases down Hank and Ben for their precious package. But it never goes anywhere, unfortunately, despite the promise of Mama Zaldívar (Cecilia Toussaint) being even more vicious than her son.
Shot on location in Brisbane and the Gold Coast in Australia, Runner doesn’t necessarily use these locations to wow the viewer. But when former stuntman Waugh actually gets to the action, he doesn’t skimp. Whether Ritchson is using the spinning wheel of an overturned car to take out a foe, knocking Zaldívar into a wall so hard that he leaves an imprint of Zaldívar in said wall, or just shooting mo’fos left and right like he’s a playable GTA 6 character, Runner is fully capable of doing what it should be doing – giving us carnage amid the amiable duo of our leads. It’s just too bad that it keeps forgetting to do that.
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