dir. Kevin Macdonald
In The Runner, lawyer Maia Marten (Gal Gadot) receives a call from an unknown number while she’s out on a run. A shady man (Damian Lewis) has kidnapped her diabetic son, and will kill him unless she murders one of her clients. Moreover, the shady man insists that Maia run to the hotel where the client is based, ostensibly because this will help him track her movements and ensure she doesn’t tell anyone. Plus, there’s an imminent deadline, so Maia has to run rather than walk. The premise falls apart pretty quickly – it’s shown that the shady man can still track Maia and hear her voice when she’s on the London Underground, so why can’t she take that much faster travel method? The route Maia takes makes absolutely no sense to any Londoner, extending her journey pointlessly. The kidnapper is shown to have copious hacking, tracking and manipulation techniques at his disposal – was this really the best way of engineering this murder? All the while, Maia blunders around the city, shoving people over, stealing their phones in failed attempts to get help, firing a gun, and jumping off a bridge. At this point, the shady man should really be aware the jig is up – but, somehow, he isn’t. The movie is already mind-bogglingly bad, but then the final moments reveal a twist so ludicrous, so contrived, and so downright disingenuous when it’s considered what came before, that it’s genuinely launched into a whole new stratosphere of bad. Maybe such an implausible plot could’ve been carried by strong performances, but neither Gal Gadot’s expressionless stare nor Damian Lewis’ smug smirking are believable. It all adheres to the theme – The Runner is, simply, unbelievable.
