Gal Gadot’s career is at a crossroads. After her film debut as Gisele Yashar in “Fast & Furious – New Model. Original Parts.” (2009), the former model enjoyed a meteoric rise as the leading lady of lavish Hollywood productions. The athletic Israeli with the charismatic smile and penetrating gaze has since been best known as Wonder Woman from the DCEU films – and also earned a record $20 million fee for the direct-to-Netflix actioner “Red Notice” (2021).
But after the unexpected flops “Wonder Woman 1984” (2020) and “Snow White” (2025), it is questionable how far Gadot’s audience appeal has actually reached, who is often accused of having too narrow a facial range. With “The Runner,” directed by experienced suspense professional Kevin MacDonald (“Touching The Void”), she would have had a chance of a comeback on Amazon Prime. Unfortunately, despite its real-time gimmick, the thriller is little more than a low-stress, completely predictable B-movie with very few new ideas.
Gal Gadot has always been athletic – and in “The Runner” she can demonstrate this more than ever.
A normal working morning in London. Single mother Maia Marten (Gal Gadot) gets her son ready for school, puts on her jogging suit and leaves the house. After she brings Noah (Rory Wilmot) to the school door, she wants to jog her daily route through the nearby park and then drive to work. But she doesn’t even get there. Her run is interrupted by a call from a stranger (Damian Lewis) who gives her an ultimatum.
Either she sprints out immediately and shoots the key witness in a murder case to which she has easy access as a lawyer – or her kidnapped son is killed. Desperate, Maia makes her way through the crowded streets of London while being monitored by her tormentor via all digital channels. How can she free herself from his web in time?
The camera promises authenticity…
“The Runner” is a (near) real-time thriller, the kind that comes to us with great regularity and therefore often only offers minimal variation without the now worn-out WOW effect. Over a crisp running time (in this case just 84 minutes), a star fights for the life of a kidnapped family member while completing a mission for an unknown perpetrator. This often involves an assassination attempt on an important person. One of the best films of this kind is the unfairly forgotten 1990s actioner “Against Time” starring Johnny Depp. Since then there have been a number of similar films such as “Final Call”, “Non-Stop”, “Don’t hang up!” or the German offshoot “Steig. Nicht. Aus!”. This always works particularly well when you are literally carried away by the charisma of the star, the originality of the situations or the pace of the plot twists.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what rarely happens in Kevin MacDonald’s paranoia thriller. Because “The Runner” relies on different elements right from the start, but they hardly ever come together. Originally, he mainly used it for his documentaries such as “One Day in September” or “Fall into the void“, the director introduced his characteristic authenticity effects, including the constantly moving hand-held camera, fast, disorienting cuts and visual trailing effects, in order to convey the increasingly destabilizing view of the protagonist. He also paints a frightening picture of a completely smartphone-addicted society in which everyone is only interested in themselves and only looks up from the small screen when it is stolen.
… but the script doesn’t comply!
However, this ambitious production reaches its limits with the particularly flat script by Mark Gibson, whose previous works usually include family films such as “Snowdogs” (2002). Not only can you predict the plot most of the time anyway, the supposed surprise at the end is also very disappointing. In addition, the script gives the protagonists complicated trauma stories, which do not help to build real empathy for the protagonist. Gal Gadot shows full physical effort as a desperate runner with a lawyer’s degree, but she lacks the same star charisma and underlying intelligence that Jodie Foster displayed in similar kidnap films such as “Flightplan” (2004).
The voice on the phone (Damian Lewis) always keeps a close eye on what Maia is up to.
The best scenes of “The Runner” are less the strenuously constructed dialogue scenes between the runner and her tormentor on the phone, in which they constantly try to psychoanalyze each other. Instead, the film is particularly fun when Kevin MacDonald finally lets the action speak for itself – especially in a sequence in which the heroine runs after a subway (!) because her cell phone is stolen.
Conclusion: The bottom line is that “The Runner” unfortunately falls short of expectations, even if these are no longer the highest compared to real-time thrillers. As a direct-to-streaming premiere on Amazon Prime Video, the name Gal Gadot will certainly attract a number of viewers, but the chances that “The Runner” will stick around in the long term are rather slim. In any case, the wait for a liberation after “Wonder Woman 1984” and “Snow White” continues for now.