The Runner review (2026)

The Runner is hardly a unique concept. It’s trying to be Speed except on feet, Crank without the adrenaline check, Carry-On sans a competent villain and a race against the clock thriller without thrills or excitement.

Gal Gadot (Heart of Stone) stars as Maia Martin, a high-profile prosecuting attorney. She’s prepping for a key witness to give a damning testimony in a murder case. But first, Maia has to get her morning run in after getting her diabetic son, Noah (Rory Wilmot), off to school. Clearly Maia is not an early to rise runner.

Not long into her jaunt, a mysterious caller (Damian Lewis) demanding she follows his implicit instructions to kill the witness or he’ll kill Noah.

To play into the theme of The Runner, the caller warns Maia to keep her pace as he put Noah in a diabetic coma. If Maia can’t get to the witnesses’ hotel room in an hour, Noah will die.

Admittedly, the premise for The Runner is silly, but it could just be a goofy, guilty pleasure. Instead, it’s just goofy.

The caller has fully hacked into Maia’s phone yet has an almost superhuman-like ability to know exactly what Maia is encountering. Screenwriter Mark Gibson (Snow Dogs) has to make the hacker unbelievably competent early on to make the threat credible.

He confidently rattles on about her childhood, her flirt-mance with co-worker, Ted (Alfred Enoch, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows: Part 2) and even some risqué photos she took for Ted.

This is a clumsy attempt at the hacker asserting some wacky sense of dominance over Maia, yet Gibson can’t actually show more logical means of control namely forcing Maia to keep her phone’s camera on. That would naturally allow the hacker to have a full vantage point of everything Maia sees. Of course, that would prevent Gibson from creating an avenue for Maia to eventually get the upper hand long enough for a happy ending.

For an “all-seeing” professional, the caller also doesn’t account for any problems like lousy cell reception, Maia forgetting to charge her phone and running out of power or Maia just writing a note to the police mid-run. With so much riding on ensuring Maia sticks to the plan, it sure seems like the hacker would have had some lookouts in place even if he had to blackmail them as well.

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The Runner absolutely requires Maia and the hacker to go through the motions of this forced dance until a final act that abandons any semblance of logic.

It’s possible The Runner could have worked despite the shaky script, but the obnoxious directing style of Kevin Macdonald (State of Play). Macdonald mistakes hyper editing and relentless motion for a tense cinematic adrenaline rush. There are far too many close-up shots to convey Maia running to her breaking point to reach the witness.

Macdonald also quickly exhausts the notion that anyone looking at Maia “suspiciously” is the hacker crying wolf far too often when someone’s glances too long at her.

The Runner starts getting ridiculously silly when Maia gets hit by a car and runs out of the ambulance to stay on pace. It reaches another level when she gets her phone snatched in the subway and races through the tunnels in order to catch up to the pickpockets. Ignoring the fact that Maia is already exhausted, she shouldn’t be in any position to outrun a subway.

Gadot does all she can with this material desperately trying to make any aspect of The Runner work. It’s an uphill marathon for a star who would benefit from another vehicle to showcase that star power after a string of misfires. It’s hard to tell who should be more exhausted after watching the film — Maia or viewers tired from waiting on something interesting to happen.

The Runner gets off and stays on the wrong foot with a thriller that lacks the creativity or savviness to make this premise a fun sprint instead of such a dull slog.

Rating: 3 out of 10

Photo Credit: Amazon

You can watch The Runner on Amazon Prime.

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