TL;DR – A conceptually interesting film that does not have the legs to make it to a full feature length.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.

Disclosure – I paid for the Amazon Prime subscription used to watch this film.

The Runner Review Introduction

Today we review a film with a very singular focus, a singular drive, it might be said. Where the title is not just a thematic exploration of the narrative, but a description of what we will be doing for the next ninety minutes. Such singular focus can work because you strip out every extraneous factor, but when you have borne your soul, you also have nowhere to hide.
  
So, to set the scene, Maia Marten (Gal Gadot) is a lawyer working in London who likes running, so much that she will fob off one of her clients to put another male runner in their place. But as she runs to the office one morning, A Caller (Damian Lewis) uses her son Noah’s (Rory Wilmot) phone. The kidnapper has two rules: Maia cannot talk to anyone else, especially the police, and two, Maia cannot bore him. She has an hour to kill a witness in her big case that only she has access to, or Noah dies.

Conceptually Interesting Film

When I think about this film, one thing it nails is its concept. The amount of ourselves in our digital world that could be used to manipulate us, control us, and replicate us. Add in a smack of AI in a world completely unready for the impacts of AI, and you have the grounding of an interesting film. You then add the antagonist as a voice in her head thanks to headphones constantly keeping people off-balance, the awkwardness that comes from acting out in public, a ticking clock of Noah’s diabetes, and London as a setting, and you have all the components for an interesting story. I also appreciated that a film set in London actually was filmed in and made use of London, even if Maia running through Barbican Centre made me realise that they filmed a lot of Andor there.    

It Just Does Not Have the Legs

While the set-up has all the factors needed for an interesting story, it unfortunately does not have the narrative legs to make it all the way to the end of a feature. The first issue is that the title of the film and the focus limit what you can do with the story. Most of the movie is just tracking shots of Gal Gadot, occasionally superimposed with the blurry back of Damian Lewis’s head. There are only so many ways that you can make that look interesting. They use a lot of choppy editing, and the music soundtrack is trying its best, but there is only so much you can do. Add to this a very poor understanding of how people act when a gun is waved around anywhere other than America, or in most of the situations here. Finally, Gal Gadot is not given enough range to pull a film like this off, given it is just her for 95% of the runtime. It honestly feels like they had a concept for a Black Mirror-length narrative and tried to pull it out to a feature, and it didn’t quite work.     

Recommendation

In the end, do we recommend The Runner? I would not say it is a bad film, but it is unfortunately a very forgettable one. There are all the components for a good film; it just never comes together into something truly interesting.

Have you watched The Runner? Let us know what you thought in the comments below. If you liked The Runner, we would recommend Novocaine to you because it also has a singular focus to it, but manages to keep it going to the final credits.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Bluesky at @Tldrmovrev, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of The Runner
Directed by – Kevin Macdonald
Written by – Mark Gibson
Music by – Tom Hodge
Cinematography by – Anthony Dod Mantle
Edited by – Sam Rice-Edwards
Production/Distribution Companies – Rockwood Pictures, Amazon MGM Studios, & Amazon Prime
Starring – Gal Gadot, Damian Lewis, Rory Wilmot, & Alfred Enoch
Rating – Australia: M;