Run, Plot Device, Run
dir: Kevin McDonald
2026
Oh, surely this should not be confused with the other movie called Runner that’s out right now as well, though it’s in cinemas, because apparently Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson are a bigger draw card than Gal Gadot, mostly because man mountain Ritchson seems to be everywhere at the moment, and Gadot’s heyday seems to have been over a decade ago when she first played an Amazonian superhero called Wonder Woman.
Yeah, but what have you done for us lately? Not much, apparently. But she still wants to show that she’s available, hello, anyone hiring? Well, until something better comes along, she agreed to be in this, which is a trifle of a thing, and I don’t even mean as good as the average trifle dessert.
What’s the hook in this? She plays a woman who has to run around London in order to save her son’s life. Hence the literal title. She is The Runner of the title.
I guess, despite my misplaced and disproportionate anger with regards to literal movie titles treating the great unwashed masses as if they’re great unwashed masses who are quite dim, the flick this most reminds me of, being Run Lola Run, also had quite a literal title. The lead character there played by Franka Potente was called Lola, and the film required her to run around Berlin, in three alternate timelines.
And yet I’m not setting my hair on fire over that one, am I? Oh no no no. Instead I’m probably going to be making references and jokes about Run Lola Run in a positive and appreciable way in order to make up for the fact that there is very little to say about this current running movie.
Look, I’m not opposed to running. It looks like fun. I have no doubt that it’s good for all sorts of reasons for the people who do it well and do it regularly. Cardiovascular health, metabolic regulation, mental health; it’s probably great for all the things that ail our mostly sedentary lives of quiet desperation. It’s not something that I do, unless I’m running to catch a bus in the morning, but I’m all for it for other people whose ankles don’t snap.
Running, in movies, conveys something else. Something much else. Tom Cruise insisted on doing it in every later Mission: Impossible movie in order to prove he can still run fast and do his own stunts at every age. Characters towards the end of most romantic comedies have to run to get to someone in time before they leave in order to show their love for this other magical person.
Running, being so difficult for the rest of us, equals love.
In action films it makes everything look more intense, like, there’s more at stake, because if you don’t exert yourself and get there in time, we’re all dead. But in a film where someone runs constantly, they have to pace themselves, but to us it passes as a blur.
To jump back to Run Lola Run, it’s not that the flick just showed her running for 90 or so minutes. The whole point of the flick is that Lola wasn’t a runner. She and her dirtbag boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) looked like and acted like they pulled bonghits all day long in between playing Xbox for hours on end and ate nothing but takeaway.
I don’t mean in a literal sense: ie. they look nothing like me; they play it as actors in second-hand clothing pretending to be people like me, just far more telegenically.
That she was running hither and thither in three timelines, only one in which she and Manni survive, to save her dim beau’s life showed both how desperate she was and how much she loved his stupid German arse. And the main interest in the flick was all the small changes that resulted in completely different outcomes, most of which had nothing to do with whether she was running or not.
The soundtrack helped as well. The runner in this film The Runner is already running. She runs for fun. Running is fun for her. She was running completely under her own steam before work completely independent of the fact that a vile crim played by Damian Lewis would then compel her to run and commit a bunch of crimes in order to stop him from killing her son, who he’s kidnapped.
The put upon protagonist, surveilled by an unstoppable antagonist, who can’t go to the cops and has to jump through increasingly surreal hoops in order to save someone else, is a commonplace plot in action flicks, but not so common that we see it constantly. It’s nowhere near as common as revenge as a motivation. But it still feels awfully familiar.
We know that this person we don’t really know because she has no time in between running to develop a character (and to what end anyway?) is going to chug along doing what the mastermind says until she kinda finds a way out of doing what she’s obligated to do but still manages to save the target, save her son and save herself and somehow get one up on the villain. It’s a given.
What would matter ordinarily is whether it’s fun along the way. This flick made for Amazon streaming that never sadly got to see the inside of a cinema anywhere is perfect streaming fodder. You could start watching this flick at any point and still know exactly what’s going on within a minute or two of being dropped in cold.
But I also have to admit that I found this flick amusing, whether perversely or not. Gadot’s character of Maia probably has excellent form as a runner (I would have absolutely no idea), but the film makes her blunder around and smack into things and people on such a frequent basis that you’d think, at some points, that she’s imitating a newborn foal. It’s adorable.
I actually involuntarily laughed out loud at several points as she blundered into people and distractedly apologised because she had her eye on the prize, or didn’t even bother to apologise at all. How rude. Still, we understand. The brute has her son hostage, and if she can’t pull off a seemingly impossible sequence of events while still being surveilled constantly in order to trick the jerky jerk who’s jerking her around, well, she can kiss that diabetic son of hers goodbye.
An ever-so-gentle kiss upon the forehead. Nah, she’ll keep running and running and stealing phones from people and generally be forced to act like the craziest but most stylish jogger the streets of London have ever seen. But what she won’t do to save her son is murder someone.
I mean, that would be the easy way out of her predicament. Plus, she’s not even being asked to run him over, or keep running over him or her until they’re dead. She has to figure that out all herself.
For once the protagonist is not an ex-special forces whatever, like every other film, but Gal Gadot isn’t, in case you never noticed, Jason Statham. Different things are being asked here of her.
In her recentish Netflix movie called Heart of Stone, where I think her character’s name was actually Stone, though it could have been “Heart” or “Of”, I guess, she was of course an ex-MI6 agent special forces type, but not this time. Take note. This is different. She’s a… human rights lawyer? No, she’s a prosecutor. Maybe she took inspiration from the very unlikely Donnie Yen Prosecutor flick where he beats up three hundred people but also upholds the law?
Nah, she just lightly bruises other pedestrians instead.
This was a completely ephemeral and superfluous flick, but I didn’t hate watching it. I laughed, even though it wasn’t a comedy, so that surely means I still got some value out of the experience.
Surely?
5 times I probably would have had a heart attack in the first 30 seconds if I was the main character (sorry son, I love you, but I couldn’t save you) out of 10
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delivered in a flat monotone“I can’t kill someone.” – can’t or won’t, Maia, maybe if you tried harder? -- The Runner
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