“Run Lola Run” meets “Impractical Jokers” in the truly abrasive “The Runner,” the latest streaming original that feels made by a committee instead of actual flesh-and-blood human beings. In a weird bit of movie timing, Prime Video has a movie called “The Runner” coming out today while Prime star Alan Ritchson (“Reacher”) has a movie called just “Runner” coming out in theaters next week. It’s all as confusing as the plot of this hyperactive exercise in illogical plotting. The only exercise you’ll get is in your mind running through the ways it makes no sense.
Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”) directs Gal Gadot as Maia Marten, a London attorney who is getting a quick run in after dropping her son Noah (Rory Wilmot) off at school. All we know about Noah is that he’s diabetic, which means that his abduction mere moments after Maia parts with him is all the more dangerous. Noah’s kidnapper (Damian Lewis) knows too, as he sends Maia live readings of her son’s glucose level on her smart phone, the one he uses to order her around in one of the most convoluted and nonsensical plots of all time.
The mysterious caller who sounds like Brody from “Homeland”—but we really only see his evil eyes and computer screen—orders Maia to go to a hotel and murder the key witness in the case she was going to prosecute that day. The idea that an evil cabal would hire someone to whack the person who could put a crime lord behind bars is a classic crime movie device, but the idea that they would coerce the attorney involved in the case to take care of it by kidnapping her son requires extreme suspension of disbelief. The very foundation of “The Runner” make almost no sense if you pause to think about it for even a second. And yet if the film has been executed in an entertaining manner, no one would care. We forgive an awful lot of illogical plotting in the name of entertainment, but Mark Gibson’s script for “The Runner” doesn’t just push that meter into the red zone, it pays almost no attention to things like normal human behavior or even how modern technology really works. It’s insulting.
Of course, as with most movies set in the mid-‘20s, there’s a shallow commentary about our international screen addiction, along with a bit of a dig at A.I. (which is incredibly rich coming from a major company like Amazon and a star who is making a notoriously A.I.-assisted movie with Doug Liman). How much Maia relies on her phone both allows the villain access to her family and becomes the device through which most of this story is told. In under 80 minutes with credits, we spend most of our time watching Wonder Woman run through London, ordered in and out of difficult situations by Lewis. There are also loose thematic seeds in the idea that Maia is running from a dark past in which her mother killed her father, but there’s no time for much of that in this deeply shallow movie.
As if Macdonald knew that there was extremely little to “The Runner,” he attempts to keep things moving through roughly a dozen cuts a minute. The ace cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle gives the film a frantic visual language that’s not unlike his “28 Years Later,” but it doesn’t suit the material at all. (Even if this movie could have really used a zombie or two.) Part of the problem is that the editing is so sped up that we never get a true sense of movement, geography, or distance. The filmmaking so constantly calls attention to itself that it drains the production of anything resembling an actual practical dilemma. When Maia jumps off a bridge or runs after a train, it produces little more than a shoulder shrug instead of a racing heartbeat because it’s so aggressively two-dimensional.
To be fair, Gadot is fine here, although one does wonder if a more charismatic actress could have grounded a film that mistakes movement for emotion. It’s not her fault the script forces her into panic and action all the time, giving her little more to play than heavy breathing. Lewis doesn’t make out any better, stuck with a goofy villain, one who actually plays the knife game between his fingers in one scene to show he’s crazy, maaaannn.
It’s this simple: “The Runner” needed to produce believable tension or just goofy fun. It chose neither, falling into the same forgettable chasm that takes so many streaming originals. I’d tell you to run to the next theater that’s not playing it, but this one is a streaming original. Maybe take a jog around the block instead.
