Joel on Film

Maia Marten (Gal Gadot) runs in The Runner, because of course, she does. In fact, she runs so much and for so long in director Kevin Macdonald’s film that one truly hopes there was a team of medical professionals on standby in the eventuality of any potential problems. The entire premise of Mark Gibson’s screenplay is that Maia must run and must keep running, and it’s up to the filmmakers to provide reasons for her to keep going, in order to arrive at a wholly predictable conclusion because no filmmaker in his right mind would allow the grimness of its possibilities come to fruition.

Maia is a lawyer, who in the opening few minutes before the movie’s actual plot starts advises a client not to speak to anyone until she arrives. Her son Noah (Rory Wilmot) is diabetic, which means that the movie will have a ticking-clock mechanism of a biological variety, to accompany the one that a voice on the phone gives her within which to complete a task. The task is murder, of course, because the stakes need to be high enough for Maia to be confronted with a moral dilemma, and to make things even more complicated, the target is a heavily protected witness set to testify against a crime boss whom Maia’s office is prosecuting.

The pieces are here for something intriguing or suspenseful, and the non-stop forward motion of the scenario promises a legitimate sense of propulsion that it does, technically, deliver. The problem here—one of quite a few, in fact—is that it delivers said propulsion at the expense of nearly everything else that might have worked in this movie. Maia is not just a runner, for instance, but a clumsy and thoughtless one when faced with any sort of stress, and it becomes a running, not-very-funny joke how many people she plows through without any consideration or apology on the way to her destination.

She tries to steal a phone, in order to have one that’s not hers, and then immediately trips and falls and drops it into a nearby body of water. Then again, she manages to match the speed of a train to meet it at its next stop, despite this not being even remotely possible, except through theoretical biophysics. In other words, Maia is a runner who might as well have operated on another planet entirely—one on which she only occasionally needed to follow the unwavering laws of physics.

Anyway, the plot has Maia receiving a phone call from the mysterious voice of an ice-cold killer of a man, played by Damian Lewis, who can track her location and see everything she’s doing with the same inconsistent logic that drives Maia’s running. This is a very silly movie, in case it isn’t obvious yet, and although Lewis does ground things a bit with his calm, cool, collected act, he’s offset by an extraordinarily imbalanced performance by Gadot. The actress obviously has the physicality for a role like this, her Amazonian features combined believably enough with a fitness to pull off the running scenes.

What Gadot can’t do as capably is to make us believe almost anything about her desperation on an emotional level. Macdonald has placed an inordinate amount of trust in his lead actress to carry whatever sincerity this scenario can offer, although that’s also quite limited. It all leads to a finale in which we think one thing—that the movie has the balls to go to some dark places—and then are revealed to have been duped at least a little bit.

In other words, the resolution of this real-time scenario is wholly impossible to accept once the curtain drops on what the filmmakers try to pull off in the finale here (it involves one of those “here’s what happened” flashbacks that answers a lot of questions but leaves us with just many as before about the logistics). The Runner certainly wastes no time, at only 80 minutes without credits, but it isn’t exactly time productively spent.

Rating: *½ (out of ****)