The Runner debuts on Prime Video on September 2.
If you’re looking for 84 minutes (with credits!) of Gal Gadot running through the streets of London in a desperate bid to save her son from a ruthless, anonymous villain, all while said baddie plays mind games with Gadot’s character via the true villain of the piece – the dreaded cellphone – then you’re in luck, because The Runner is on Prime Video now, just waiting for you to half pay attention while… scrolling through your feeds on your phone, probably.
The film stars the former Wonder Woman as Maia Marten, one of those super-powerful, super-smart, super-hot lawyers that movies and TV shows are always shoving at us. As the film starts, we learn that Maia has managed to nail down a key witness in the murder trial of a notorious crime boss. And now she’s being blackmailed by a mysterious “Caller,” as he’s called in the credits, to use her status as a super-powerful/super-smart/super-hot lawyer to get to that witness and murder him, thereby ensuring that the crime boss goes free. Easy peasy, right?
Using Maia’s kidnapped son Noah (Rory Wilmot) as the carrot and the stick, the Caller forces our heroine to take on this job, but in one of The Runner’s several cracks in logic, for some reason he’s forcing her to do so on the clock, so she has to literally turn her morning run into a run for her son’s life, sprinting across London for most of the film and finding herself in increasingly dangerous and, at times, outlandish situations. (As soon as Maia mentions that Noah’s diabetic, in an awkward opening scene that is clearly all ADR’d, we were clearly in for a Chekhov’s Insulin situation.)
It’s hard not to like Gadot, no matter what role she’s playing – that “Imagine” fracas from a few years back notwithstanding – and she gives The Runner her all, even as she seems to be slowly running into permanent straight-to-streaming status. Certainly she sells Maia’s determination to save her son, as well as the character’s interior conflict regarding what she has to do in order to accomplish that first thing. Gadot does get an occasional laugh line, as she’s forced to do what the Caller says, even if that means calling a fellow mom who didn’t invite Noah to her kid’s birthday party a “bitch.” Meanwhile, an attempt at some back story complexity for Maia involving her own mother’s dark past doesn’t amount to much in the end, but that’s a failure of the script rather than the actress.
Nor does The Runner have a satisfying answer to how Maia can resolve her conundrum. “I’m not a killer,” she tells the Caller, and yet she must kill in order to save her boy. The film resorts to fairly ridiculous means to sort out this mess at its climax, which places it in the realm of something along the lines of an unsatisfying Columbo wrap-up as we’re told who did what when and how. Along the way, director Kevin Macdonald (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland) and scripter Mark Gibson seem to also be trying to comment on the state of the world today, a place where cellphones are ubiquitous and, I dunno, bad?
Macdonald does stage some engaging set pieces for Gadot as she constantly has to plow through pedestrians in order to get to her destination on time. Over the course of the film she finds herself running over bridges, onto boats, in front of cars, onto the London tube, over kiosks, and so on and so on. Intermixed with this action is flashes of the Caller, as well as the occasional voyeuristic glimpse of other folks in the city and what they’re saying and texting on their phones. As for the Caller himself, while he hacks into Maia’s phone and uses her most private information for his own ends, we never learn anything about him at all. That he’s played by Billions and Homeland’s Damian Lewis, even if the actor is mostly heard and rarely seen, makes this latter point all the more glaring, as he ultimately feels wasted in the role.
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