Courtesy of Wonder Woman 1984, Death on the Nile, and Disney’s live-action Snow White—as well as her disastrously received “Imagine” pandemic video—Gal Gadot has been the subject of meme-fueled mockery for years.
With The Runner, however, it’s not so much the actress’ performance that deserves derision but, rather, the film’s atrocious direction. Shot and edited in the most gratingly frantic manner imaginable, Kevin Macdonald’s race-against-time streaming thriller (September 2, Prime Video) is a non-stop assault on the senses that fails to generate the anxious momentum it craves. Flashy, insistent, and altogether pretentious, it’s a fine example of migraine cinema.
In London, Maia Marten (Gadot) gets her son Noah (Rory Wilmot) ready for school, telling him to keep an eye on his insulin levels as he plays beside a Noah’s Ark toy set. Whether this is because he’s named after, or just feels a kinship with, the biblical figure is unclear, but Maia’s athletic shirt, leggings, and Nike sneakers plainly indicate that she’s the film’s title character.
After dropping off Noah, she gets a call from Ted McBain (Alfred Enoch), a colleague whom she’s breaking up with (because he isn’t interested in having kids) and who tells her about a change in plans for a witness pick-up, indicating that she’s a lawyer. Then, she heads off for a jog.
Mark Gibson’s script dispenses details as its protagonist picks up the pace through a sprawling park. Digital phone noise (calls, podcast broadcasts, news reports, music) is omnipresent in The Runner, suggesting a world beholden to its devices, and Maia soon becomes urgently tethered to her own when she’s contacted by a mysterious man (Homeland and Billions star Damian Lewis) who explains that he’s kidnapped Noah and that she must follow his rules for the kid to live.
Those guidelines are relatively simple: don’t talk to anyone; do as he says; and don’t bore him. To guarantee that she complies, he’s put Noah in a hyper-glycemic coma, and she has one hour to fulfill his mission if she wants to reach the boy in time to give him the life-saving medicine she possesses.
This is a dastardly plot straight out of any number of ticking-clock genre affairs (think Speed and Die Hard with a Vengeance), and The Runner establishes it swiftly. Unfortunately, its affectations immediately thwart any chance of immersing the viewer in Maia’s plight.
When not spastically jouncing alongside the character, Macdonald’s camera loves to get in close to its heroine’s face, the better to see her panicked eyes and grimacing mouth, and it does likewise for Lewis’ Caller, whose visage is only glimpsed in fragmentary bits and pieces in order to amplify his cagey mysteriousness.
Often, these images are cut together for maximum agitated energy, and they’re frequently in herky-jerky slow-motion and decorated with smeary frame outlines that, together, render everything look-at-me exasperating.
The Runner’s self-conscious visuals are matched by a soundscape of smartphone detritus and screechy feedback, and though a closing gesture implies the film critiques our device-addicted here and now, that notion is undercut by Macdonald’s obvious attempt to exploit that tech for excitement. That proves futile, since from the start he incessantly sticks to Maia while his aesthetics push us away from her, creating an additional layer of unpleasant dissonance.
Twice in its early going, The Runner overtly references its headliner’s beauty—the Caller opines that she’s too attractive to have had a child on her own, and he peruses private lingerie selfies on her phone—and it makes sure to highlight (if not gawk at) her body throughout. Such shallowness fits the rest of the proceedings, which mostly involve Gadot’s legal eagle running through the city as the Caller explains that the only way she can rescue her son is by killing the star witness in her trial against a crime boss.
The reason the Caller is confident Maia is up to this task is that she was trained to use firearms by her abusive father, who was then murdered by her mother—a traumatic tragedy that motivates him to psychoanalyze her as a woman who wants to “assert your will over violent men.”
Vaguely cast as a feminist defender/avenger, Gadot huffs and puffs as she barges her way through crowds, leaps on top of houseboats, passes diverse, annoyed pedestrians (moms, babies, construction workers, etc.), and dodges bicycles, motorcycles, and cars—one of which hits her, creating the first of several perilous delays.
All the while, the Caller taunts her with AI commentary from Noah, scary videos of the boy lying unconscious on a bed, and cracks about her personality and past. Since Maia believes that 99 percent of defending oneself is “controlling the narrative,” it’s easy to surmise that she’s not being totally honest with her tormentor. And even aside from her theft of cellphones (to call/text for help), multiple oblique moments insinuate that she’s playing a clandestine game to take down the Caller.
Lewis’ villain has a gargantuan God complex and his techno-omniscience fuels The Runner’s story, granting him limitless access to her life and whereabouts, but the film’s script has him make one cornball pronouncement after another (“Might is right”; “Fear is a stronger motivator than love”).
Asked to look perpetually harried, Gadot weeps and rages in equal measure, and though her dialogue isn’t as consistently awful as that given to the Caller, her comment to a priest—“Did you know there’s more blood in the human body than you can fathom?”—is a notably weird and baffling lowlight. Not that anything uttered actually matters. Macdonald’s sole objective is to keep the pedal to the metal (or is that feet to the pavement?) and wrap things up quickly.
Minus credits, The Runner doesn’t even cross the 80-minute mark, so in that minor regard, the director is successful. Yet for all its hustle and bustle, the film is less efficient than sketchy, its wannabe pulse-pounding velocity never making the material breathless.
Striving to provide vicarious thrills born from watching Gadot run, run, and run some more from the comfort of one’s couch, it’ll merely have viewers hurrying to grab the remote to change the channel.
