‘The Runner’ Review: Gal Gadot Sprints Through London, But This Thriller Never Finds Its Legs

Gal Gadot returns to genre filmmaking with ‘The Runner’, a real time thriller that drops her into the streets of London as a hostage negotiator’s worst nightmare. She plays Maia Marten, a high powered attorney and single mother whose morning jog turns into a nightmare when a mysterious voice on the phone tells her that her son has been taken.

The premise borrows heavily from the voice on the phone subgenre that has been popular in various forms for decades, pitting an ordinary person against an unseen antagonist who issues commands under threat of violence. Director Kevin Macdonald, working from a script by Mark Gibson, sets the entire film against the backdrop of a ticking clock, forcing Maia to complete a series of tasks across the city before time runs out. It arrives on Prime Video with the kind of glossy, high gloss marketing push that suggests Amazon wants this to be appointment viewing for a Wednesday night.

Once the jogging actually starts, though, the film settles into a rhythm that never quite escalates the way it should. Gadot handles the physical demands of the role with the same commitment she brought to her action heroine days, and there is a certain committed silliness to watching her sprint past double decker buses while barking demands into a wireless earpiece. The problem is that the emotional register never rises to meet the stakes, and every declaration of maternal desperation lands with the same flat urgency as a grocery list.

Damian Lewis, voicing the mysterious caller pulling Maia’s strings, is clearly having more fun than anyone else involved. He leans into the theatrical menace of the role, savoring every threat and taunt with a kind of gleeful malice that the rest of the film could have used more of. Whenever he is on the soundtrack, the movie briefly wakes up, only to slip back into autopilot the moment Maia starts running again.

Visually, the film has a slick, saturated look, all drone shots of the Thames and needle drops that feel imported from a perfume commercial rather than a thriller about a kidnapped child. That style over substance approach might have worked if the plot had any surprises up its sleeve, but the twists arrive exactly when you expect them, and the resolution plays things about as safely as possible. There is a moment midway through where the film flirts with letting Maia make a genuinely uncomfortable moral choice, and the refusal to follow through on that thread is where the whole exercise reveals its lack of ambition.

The supporting cast, including Rory Wilmot as Maia’s son and Alfred Enoch in a smaller role, do serviceable work with underwritten material, but this is fundamentally a two hander between Gadot and Lewis, and only one of them seems to understand what kind of movie they are in. At a brisk running time, the film never overstays its welcome, but it also never builds the kind of tension that would make the sprint feel worth taking.

There is a version of ‘The Runner’ that leans fully into its own absurdity and becomes a gloriously trashy hate watch, and there is another version that plays it straight as a tense survival thriller. This film sits uncomfortably between those two identities, never silly enough to be a guilty pleasure and never sharp enough to be genuinely gripping. My own time with it was pleasant enough as background noise, buoyed mostly by Lewis chewing through his dialogue, but I never found myself leaning forward waiting to see what happened next.

Taking everything into account, from the committed physicality of its lead to the wasted potential of its central gimmick, I am landing on 5.5 out of 10 for ‘The Runner’. It is glossy, forgettable streaming fare that will fill an evening without demanding much of you, and forget most of it by the following morning.

Did ‘The Runner’ get your heart racing or did you spend the whole time checking your watch, drop your verdict in the comments below.