Directed By Kevin Macdonald

Starring – Gal Gadot, Damian Lewis, Rory Wilmot

The Plot – A successful London-based attorney (Gadot) is thrust into a tense and dangerous race across the city after her son, Noah (Wilmot) is abducted. Forced to obey a series of cryptic commands from a mysterious Caller (Lewis), she races against time through a web of secrets and threats in a desperate bid to save her son.

Rated PG-13 for violent content/some bloody images, some sexual material, strong adult language and a drug reference.

The Runner – Official Trailer | Prime Video

POSITIVES

Finding beneficial aspects in a movie this clumsily contrived and contentiously convenient is like searching for a proverbial needle in a Texas-sized haystack, however there are some beneficial gains between pacing and performances that at least make the experience periodically tolerable for those expecting very little out of it. While his leading lady stumbles at every emotionally-charged opportunity Damian Lewis is quite cunningly conniving as the movie’s established antagonist, unloading his best Jason Statham impression to the deliveries of his maniacally menacing threats. While Lewis is subjected to a character outline derived from every other kidnapping villain over the last forty years of cinema, his compelling magnetic charisma and advantageous psychology make for a sizeable threat that balances tension and vulnerability accordingly to Maia’s situational plight, and with some meaningful atmospheric documentation in everything from concealing camera angles to ominous shadows, Lewis triumphs in maximizing the potential of his limited framing, offering an effortlessly detestable adversary who makes Maia’s conflict all the more investing by his sleezy and slimy antics continuously elevating the stakes at all times. Likewise, while the movie’s barely minimal 77-minute runtime does condense much of the storytelling into these long-winded exposition dump diatribes, it does help to maintain the urgency of Macdonald’s intended direction, especially alongside the on-screen graphics of a countdown clock conveying the value in each dwindling second of Maia’s opportunity. As a result of the movie’s breakneck speed, the engagement never even has the chance of overstaying its welcome in the most sluggishly sauntered kind of disposition, and while The Runner is undoubtedly on the shortlist of the year’s worst films, I can’t exactly assess that I was ever bored with the experience, even in the comfortable confines of an at-home watch that could easily inspire me to reach for my cell phone a time or two throughout.

NEGATIVES

After Amazon willingly released last year’s War of the Worlds to audaciously amateur results, it made matters clear that the streaming app values content over craftsmanship, and considering The Runner’s own unintentional remarkability enacts this complete lack of logical awareness in the confidence of its interpretive audience, it leaves the experience bewildered by the dimensions of a finished product that is constantly working against its appeal, a feat made all the more impressive with a distinguished director like Macdonald guiding the movie’s execution. Being the very same man who effortlessly elicits these tensely riveting atmospheres in heralded classics like The Last King of Scotland, and the vastly underrated Black Sea, Macdonald’s lazily and quite literally phoned-in approach here is reflective of the five years since his last narrative-driven effort, with more paid underlining emphasis to evocative style over scintillating substance, in order to immerse audiences in the intensity of Maia’s race against the clock, and while the stirred ingredients of aggressively overzealous editing techniques, handheld camera work during running, and abrasive volume mixing of its accompanying score might initially breed this anxiety into the tangibility of the audience, it eventually leads to this dizzying and frantic pace that contorts the cohesion of both the developments and the script’s abundance of backstory exposition, leaving it difficult to invest in the plight of the protagonist, as a result of Macdonald constantly hurling so much information and immersion in your face at all times. The running sequences themselves are also a tremendous hurdle to overcome, between the artificially jarring circumstance of unsubtly deposited A.D.R work towards the many extras that Maia clashes unceremoniously with during her long-distance journey, or hilariousness of the maintained gimmick wiping away any semblance of authenticity from the emotional undertow of the stakes that hang in the balance, occasionally eliciting motion sickness any time my eyes even momentarily looked away from such a horrendous presentation based entirely on constant movements of each and every frame. All of this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the script was exceptionally compelling throughout, but unfortunately the creative outline from Mark Gibson not only relies heavily on multiple conveniences and canyon sized logic leaps throughout the extent of Maia’s defensive measures against this plaguing voice, but also an unnecessarily contrived climax that eviscerates hopeful optimism in this movie’s advantageous outlook once and for all. On one hand, I guess you could commend the resolution for being unpredictable, as nobody could’ve ever conjured such initially meaningless aspects leading to such momentous gains, but everything from the ghastly looking visuals of a deviated frame rate to the play-by-play preparation of the characters surmises this all-too-clever wink and nod to the audience that thinks it’s a lot smarter than it actually is, resulting in more unpreparable circumstances than all of the Now You See Me movies combined. It also doesn’t help that the script and its unsubtly all-encompassing dialogue is also in a race against the clock, as it attempts to shoe-horn as much on-the-nose backstory and exposition into the disparaging depths of these disbelieving conversations to make them feel as unintentionally telegraphed as possible, leaving little to chance with even temporary intrigue or prolonged uncertainty to add to a narrative experience whose strings never seam together. Such an example pertains to Maia’s own tortured past with her distanced parents, which is structured and sequenced into a creative corner so claustrophobically that it leaves only so many options to what the big reveal could be, but even in the mental chess game between Maia and her mysterious caller, there’s little attention paid to the focus of the antagonistic motivation for the audience to understand his desperation without all together justifying it, leaving it another in the laundry list of flimsily enacted fluff utilized to pad out a barely registering runtime of a story that is quite literally going through the motions. If this isn’t enough, the film’s framing centering around a conditional runner also evokes the shameless shilling opportunity to use an infectious soundtrack to inject the film with a much-needed personality during the opening act, before it deviates to dark, with some of the song titles and lyrics of the tracks correlating so obviously to the contextual creativity of the film. Songs like ‘Running’ by Fat Dog, or ‘Hanging on the Telephone’ by Blondie, are just two such mentions of the mindless meandering that this movie’s production was inflicting on the dwindling integrity of this film, specifically during moments where they stand out so dominantly over the movie’s sound design, and while I’m not above contextual relativity for songs injected to a film during post-production, they’re typically used ironically in comedies where the audience is in on the joke, so they add nothing beneficially to an action thriller involving such meaningful stakes to the established protagonist. Speaking of that protagonist, I think we’re now at the point when we all understand that Gal Gadot cannot deliver meaningful lines without monotonously compromising to a scene’s integrity, with her mustered work here making her unintentionally memorable turns in Snow White and Death on the Nile feel Oscar-worthy by comparison. Gadot certainly looks the part for the dependable physicality of the role, as she’s a superhero specimen who first broke onto the scene as Wonder Woman, however emotionally she brings the same kind of robotic registry of a young Tommy Wiseau, made ironically by one such scene where the kidnapper uses an A.I replication of her voice believably and effectively. Even the character’s most vulnerably empathetic moments lead to Gadot articulating this forcefully faking embodiment that completely flounders her dreaded disposition, and with Gadot being on-screen for nearly 100% of the scenes, the distractive emphasis of her undertaking is made all the more evident with consistency, laying the groundwork for a protagonist turn so bewildering by her blundering. Finally, even the film’s intentioned cautionary message against technological dependency fails to flourish anything meaningfully compelling or original to the objective, convoluted morally by Maia’s third act usage of it in order to overcome the immense odds in front of her. If the script is so hellbent on advocating against such advancements, then it sure has a funny way of showing it, as the movie, unintentionally or not, showcases the best and worst against the vulnerabilities of humanity, without anything in the range of depth to expand upon its commentary, and considering this ambition is humbled by an aforementioned 77-minute runtime, it leaves little to the explorable availability of the material, resulting in a squandered and shallow moral swim not powerful enough to eventually sink in.

OVERALL
The Runner is a breezily brisk bewilderment of ridiculous absurdities, where the suspension of disbelief and logic leaps requires audiences to dumb themselves down, in order to meet the movie at eye level. With an emotionally vapid performance from Gal Gadot, as well as dizzyingly disorienting direction from Kevin Macdonald, this accelerated trot against the advancements and dependability of technology gases out long before the crossing the finish line, cementing another bottom of the barrel tax write-off for Amazon that proves the best nights are spent out and about

My Grade: 2.4 or F