Kevin Macdonald's The Runner is the latest in a wave of thrillers in which a hapless protagonist is forced to become an accomplice to a crime, receiving orders from an anonymous villain over the phone. The formula worked quite well in Drop and Carry-On, but crucially, those movies were anchored by lead turns from capable actors in Meghann Fahy and Taron Egerton. Expecting a performer as limited as Gal Gadot to carry a movie on her own is asking for trouble, especially when the script is as shoddy as the one provided here by screenwriter Mark Gibson.
Remember that sequence in Dirty Harry where the villain made a wheezy Harry Callahan run from one phone box to another across San Francisco? Well, The Runner is basically that idea stretched out to 85 minutes, with the hyperactive energy of Run Lola Run added for good measure. It sounds like a formula for success, but the movie fails to do anything exciting with its premise.
Gadot plays Maia, a prosecutor whose latest case requires a key witness to testify against his mob boss in a murder trial. After dropping her young son off at school, Maia begins her morning routine of jogging to her office (I hope there's a shower in her office). She's pegging it through London's scenic parks and listening to Blondie when she receives a call from an anonymous man (Damian Lewis, credited as "The Caller") who has kidnapped her boy and will off the kid if Maia doesn't follow his instructions. The Caller directs Maia to a hidden pistol and orders her to execute the witness, who is in a hotel five miles away. Maia has an hour to get to the hotel before the witness leaves.
And she's off. If you enjoy watching someone run, bump into people and occasionally stumble, you're in luck. That's essentially what you get for most of The Runner's err... running time. Macdonald fails to make any of this visually interesting, himself and fellow Danny Boyle associate, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, aping Boyle's manic style and giving the movie the dated look of a '90s music video in the process. We get booming music cues and lots of shaky cam, all designed to fool us into believing we're watching something more adrenalised than we really are. We're not fooled.
The script doesn't create any tension or suspense from the scenario. There aren't enough obstacles placed in Maia's way, either of the physical or metaphorical kind. It doesn't help that Maia appears to be indestructible. At one point she is hit by a car and knocked unconscious, yet this seems to have no physical effect on her for the rest of the movie.
Gadot is such an easy target that I feel bad highlighting her flaws, but she really is awful here. Maia's son is set to be killed but Gadot's lack of emotion is more in line with someone trying to get to the bank before her lunch break ends. I'll be kind and lay some of the blame at the terrible script, which reduces her torment to lines like "oh no, my boy," and "you bastard!"
Lewis at least gets to sit in a chair for most of his performance. The movie makes the bizarre decision to hide his face until the climax, as if the reveal is some sort of twist. This would make sense if The Caller was a character we were already familiar with, but we don't know this bloke from Adam, so if you've paid for a decent actor like Lewis, why not show his face?
The Runner gets some production value from its decision to shoot in actual London locations. It's a refreshing change to see a real city portray itself on screen, but thanks to some of the worst directing of extras I've ever seen, the UK capital has all the reality of a Burbank soundstage here. The movie is making some half-assed point about how we're all on our phones all the time now, but it hammers home this message by having literally every Londoner walk around with their eyes staring at their phone. The extras behave like video game NPCs, existing solely for our heroine to bump into and trip over, as though Maia is the only person in London who hasn't been turned into a zombie. That said, The Runner is so uninvolving that you'll be tempted to stare at your own phone for distraction. Jog on.
The Runner is on Prime Video
Directed by: Kevin Macdonald
Starring: Gal Gadot, Damian Lewis, Rory Wilmot, Alfred Enoch
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