THE STORY – Maia Marten has built her life on being one step ahead — a sharp, resourceful, high-powered lawyer at the top of London’s legal world. During her routine morning run, a single phone call shatters her world: her son has been taken. The instructions to get him back are simple and merciless — keep moving, follow every command, and tell no one. Stop, and he dies. Forced to sprint through the city and obey a series of sinister commands, Maia must confront an impossible question: how far will she go to bring her son home?
THE CAST – Gal Gadot, Damian Lewis, Rory Wilmot & Alfred Enoch
THE TEAM – Kevin Macdonald (Director) & Mark Gibson (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 84 Minutes
I hate running. I last tried to get into the allegedly good-for-you habit during quarantine, trotting around my city block in a frustrating attempt not to completely atrophy. Suffice to say, horror movies are my preferred form of cardio. In “The Runner,” Gal Gadot doesn’t share this hesitation. In fact, she’s none other than the titular role, and the film must be in contention for most accurate title of the year. In “The Runner,” Gadot plays the alliteratively named Maia Marten, and wow, does she do a lot of running. Dressed in athletic wear, she spends nearly the entire movie racing through the streets, underground, and buildings of busy London, but her jog is far from casual or even voluntary. She’s the victim of an elaborate plot to assassinate a key witness in a high-profile case, and thanks to a crafty antagonist on the other end of her phone line, she’s forced to trot, sprint, and hurdle to try and get to her target in time. Although the film’s distractingly busy editing and camerawork suggest a high-tension thrill ride, the ridiculousness of the script and Gadot’s typically wooden performance make this a workout worth skipping.
Maia is a high-powered attorney, doing an admirable job balancing her high-stress job with raising her son Noah (Rory Wilmot). One day, after sending him off to school, she receives a call from Noah while out on a run. Or rather, Noah’s number, but her son isn’t on the other end of the line. Instead, she’s greeted by the mysterious, malicious Caller (Damian Lewis, playing very much into typecasting). Working for an unknown employer, the Caller tells Maia she must kill the star witness in her latest big trial before he can testify. To convince her to go from being a killer in the courtroom to a literal killer, the Caller lets Maia know that he’s put her son into a diabetic coma by hacking his insulin-dispensing app. Maia is given one hour to achieve her goal. To get to the other side of town and carry it out, she must traverse London on foot as quickly as possible.
There’s no doubt that Gadot’s character is physically up to the task. She is Wonder Woman, after all. But while she may be perfectly cast for the many, many scenes of her running and dodging in pursuit of her bloody finish line, as soon as Gadot is forced to deliver dialogue, the illusion of performance crumbles. The actress has become somewhat infamous for her awkward acting abilities (I’ll never forget last year’s Venice Film Festival audience unabashedly laughing at her non-comedic performance in “In the Hand of Dante”), and “The Runner” doesn’t give her the chance to alter that perception. Her speech pattern is robotic, which actually makes the moment where the villain uses an AI replication of her voice more believable. And when she’s asked to deliver high emotion, it can’t help but feel forced. Any moment where she attempts to cry feels more like a child faking remorse to get out of punishment rather than a distressed mother experiencing the worst day of her life. And yet, this is far from her least successful performance. Perhaps it’s because so much of her time on-screen requires her to be jumping, dashing, and generally exerting herself. Still, she comes out of the film having delivered a decidedly middlebrow performance which, given her track record, can be called a half-hearted win.
However, director Kevin Macdonald really phones it in with this one (pun absolutely intended). It’s no easy task to direct a film that often centers around one actor doing nothing but receiving a phone call, but Macdonald’s solutions aren’t successful. He swirls the camera around Gadot with the abandon of a credit card commercial parodying cheesy action movies. This leads to several awkward shots, such as blurry close-ups of Gadot’s mouth, dizzying camera placement shifts, and unflattering angles of the actress captured from below her chin. The choppy editing only emphasizes the unpleasant cinematography, using jerky techniques like a repeated insistence on the step-printing effect – a distracting choice. Oddly, Damian Lewis is shot much more effectively, with heavy shadows and deliberately obscuring angles hiding his face. In fact, some of the most powerful moments in the film occur when his lips curl into a sneer in close-up during moments of triumph. Of course, it helps that Lewis is powerfully compelling as a villain.
Eventually, the film gallops toward a conclusion that’s meant to take the audience aback with an unplanned twist. However, it relies on hiding information from viewers that the main character herself knows, making it feel as if we’re being duped rather than enlightened by the climactic revelations. Furthermore, it’s unclear where the film stands on the overreliance on, and prevalence of, technology. At times, the Caller mocks Maia’s overly-digitized life, along with bemoaning society’s nose-to-the-ground phone addictions. When he plays a replication of Maia’s voice, he chides, “Isn’t AI amazing? Irresponsible to have unleashed it on the general public, really.” It seems as if the film takes a decidedly anti-tech stance, especially given that a good portion of the final twist requires analog techniques far from the digital cloud…but not entirely. Some part of these final drastic measures relies on the ubiquity of cell phones, leading to a muddled conclusion.
Admittedly, the final montage revealing the true way of things is fun, until you start to think about it too long. The film isn’t elevated enough to support it; instead, Maia must commit a series of insane acts that most city-dwellers would ignore for their own safety. In fact, the film might have been more perversely enjoyable if it leaned into this nonsensical energy (although the fact that very few people address the bleeding head wound she receives about halfway through the film is unintentionally hilarious). I’d normally make some “walk, don’t run” joke about this film, but given that it’s being released straight to Amazon Prime Video, no method of exertive movement is required to avoid “The Runner.”
