Review: THE RUNNER Makes Gal Gadot Run Her Ass Off for a Thriller That Isn’t Worth the Workout

I jumped into The Runner wanting to have a good time. I’m an avid runner myself, so a real-time thriller built around Gal Gadot sprinting through London while trying to save her kidnapped son sounded like something I might be able to get behind.

Give me a ticking clock, some sweaty desperation, a sinister voice on the phone, and Gadot dodging traffic while racing against time. There could’ve been something interesting there.

Unfortunately, The Runner turned out to be a really, really rough watch. It’s only around 90 minutes long, yet somehow it feels like I spent half the day watching Gadot run from one increasingly silly plot development to the next. This was a very hard movie to get through.

I kept waiting for the movie to click, for something that would spark anything interesting. Instead, I finished the movie wondering how Amazon greenlit something that was so lifeless.

Gadot plays Maia Marten in the story, a successful London corporate attorney whose morning run becomes a nightmare when she gets a call informing her that her diabetic son has been kidnapped.

The mysterious caller appears to have control over her phone, knows where she is, can monitor her through surveillance cameras, and tells her to keep running and follow his instructions or her son dies.

Eventually, Maia is told that she must kill one of her own clients, the caller’s incarcerated boss, if she wants her kid back. Okay! That’s wonderfully stupid thriller material. I can work with that!

The problem is Mark Gibson’s screenplay never figures out how to turn the setup into something genuinely exciting. Instead, Maia runs. Then she runs some more. A vehicle hits her taking her down. She runs again. Someone calls. More running. She throws up, and she’s back at it. She just runs.

At a certain point, I started thinking the biggest threat to Maia wasn’t the kidnapper, it was dehydration. The movie tries desperately to convince us that motion equals suspense, but watching someone run really isn’t that thrilling.

What makes this especially frustrating is that The Runner comes from Kevin Macdonald, the filmmaker behind Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland, and State of Play. This guy knows how to make compelling movies, which makes the clumsiness of the filmmaking here baffling.

Macdonald throws every possible visual trick at the screen in an attempt to inject adrenaline into the material. The camera races, whips, tilts, lunges, chases and behaves like it drank a bunch of energy drinks before production started.

Even cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, whose kinetic work with Danny Boyle has produced some fantastic imagery, can’t turn all that movement into actual tension. London should be an incredible playground for this concept, especially with the surveillance angle turning an enormous city into a trap Maia can’t escape, but the location rarely develops any personality.

The movie keeps shouting, “THIS IS URGENT!” through its filmmaking while the screenplay gives me very little reason to actually feel that urgency.

I’ll give Gadot credit because she absolutely commits to the physical demands of the role. She runs her ass off, and by the end I was exhausted on her behalf. But The Runner also feels bizarrely designed to emphasize her limitations rather than capitalize on what she does well.

Playing Wonder Woman showed exactly how effective she can be when a character plays to her strengths. Diana’s earnestness, sincerity and slightly sheltered view of humanity worked beautifully with Gadot’s natural screen presence.

Maia needs a completely different toolkit. We’re repeatedly told that she’s brilliant, ruthless, calculating and capable of controlling situations several moves ahead, yet most of what we actually see is Gadot looking terrified, sweaty and out of breath.

That isn’t entirely her fault because the screenplay doesn’t give her enough material to sell Maia’s intelligence. Then the movie reaches its big reveal and suddenly expects us to accept that Maia has been exceptionally clever and resourceful in ways the previous hour-plus hasn’t convincingly established.

Instead of making me rethink everything I’ve watched, the ending made me feel like, “Oh, come on!” It was frustrating.

Look, I’m perfectly happy to turn my brain down a few notches for a fun B-movie thriller. In fact, sometimes that’s exactly what I want! But this movie is asking me to swallow a ludicrous story, and if it’s going to do that, it better feed me some kind of entertainment! The Runner doesn’t.

The villain’s elaborate scheme involves kidnapping, hacking, surveillance, blackmail, murder and enough cardio to make a marathon training plan look lazy, yet the motivation underneath all of it is insanely thin.

Maia’s traumatic family history, involving her mother going to prison for killing her father, initially suggests the movie might have something interesting to say about who Maia has become. Instead, it becomes another mechanism for a later reveal that feels more convenient than emotionally earned.

That’s ultimately the movie’s biggest problem. It keeps arranging pieces for twists rather than building characters who make those twists satisfying.

After watching The Runner, I found that I wasn’t alone in wondering what the hell happened here. The movie currently has an 8% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

I tried hard to find my way into this movie, especially because the running angle should have been an easy hook for me, but there just isn’t enough suspense, emotional depth, good writing, playfulness, or fun to keep the thing alive.

Gadot gives the movie everything physically, and there are a handful of moments where you can glimpse the lean, nasty little race-against-time thriller this could have been. That almost makes it more frustrating.

Take this same premise, embrace the absurdity, give Maia sharper material, give the London setting more of a dangerous character dynamic, give the story a villain worth fearing, and let the whole thing rip.

Instead, The Runner huffs and puffs its way through an exhausting amount of manufactured urgency without generating much actual excitement.

Everyone involved probably got one hell of a workout, so congratulations on the cardio. As a movie, though? I can’t recommend it. I wanted to run alongside this movie. By the end, I just wanted to run away from it.