Okay so I need to get this out of my system immediately because I am still vibrating with rage. The Runner, the new Gal Gadot thing on Prime Video, is one of the most baffling pieces of studio filmmaking I have sat through this year, and not in a fun way, in a “who approved this script” way. It currently sits at 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, and honestly I think that’s generous. Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com called it “one of the most convoluted and nonsensical plots of all time” and said it shows “almost no attention to believable human behaviour or how modern technology works,” and I want to shake that man’s hand because he nailed it in one sentence better than I’m about to manage in a thousand words.
Here’s the premise, and stay with me because it genuinely does not get less ridiculous the more you think about it. Gadot plays Maia Marten, a London attorney and former pentathlon champion, and while she’s out on her morning run some guy calls her, who we only ever know as the Caller, and tells her that her diabetic son Noah has been kidnapped. The rule is simple, keep moving, do exactly what I say, tell nobody, or your son dies. She’s got an hour to get across the city and kill a witness named Tafa who’s about to testify against a defendant named Boyd in the trial she’s prosecuting. So yes – you are right… It is Speed. It’s Speed except instead of a bus that explodes below fifty miles an hour, it’s a woman who has to physically keep jogging through London while solving an assassination plot, and I cannot stress enough how much the movie wants you to take this seriously. I mean, it’s taking itself seriously, so why didn’t I??
I mean look, I would have forgiven a lot of this. Dumb high concepts can absolutely work, that’s the whole appeal of a movie like Speed in the first place, a bus that can’t slow down is a beautifully stupid engine for ninety minutes of tension because it’s simple and visible and you never have to explain it twice. The Runner does not have that kind of restraint. It wants the Speed adrenaline and the prestige-thriller twist ending at the same time, and that is where the whole thing collapses.
Fullon Spoilers to this Movie You Shouldn’t Watch Anyway
So here is that horrifically banal and non-sensical plot. Our runner, Maia “kills” Tafa… and succeeds in saving her son. But that means Maia is a big meany! And selfish to boot! EXCEPT!! Maia didn’t actually kill Tafa. Nope! It was all staged from the jump. She has somehow secretly been running an entire counter-operation this whole time, using a stolen phone to reach her colleague Ted and recruiting total strangers off the street to help her fake the murder. The plan required a) blanks in her gun and b) blood packs on Tafa so it looked like a real kill. But wait?!? And how did she communicate this incredibly precise, extraordinarily orante life-or-death timing-dependent plan to the people who need to execute it?
Well of course!! She wrote out the intructions in lipstick on a pub glass. “Use blanks and blood bags.” Specifies the exact gun, a Ruger LCP. Leaves it for a random pub patron to find, read, and then decide, on their own initiative, to call a specific police contact about it. I’m sorry, WHAT? Then, separately, she hands a stolen phone to a stranger on the Tube and asks them to also make a call on her behalf in order to communicate how this high flying trapeze act without a net is going to go down. That’s the plan. That is the entire plan. Two strangers, a lipstick message, and vibes.
And then somehow, in the fifteen minutes or so this all has to come together, the police not only believe two random tips from two random civilians they’ve never met, they also source blank ammunition for an American handgun that’s genuinely uncommon in the UK, track down a special-effects squib technician on zero notice, rig an actual human being with detonators and blood bags, and coordinate the timing so it all fires the instant Maia pulls the trigger, in a hotel room, live, with no rehearsal. I want to be generous here. I really do. But there is no version of this where I don’t sit up and go wait, the entire ending hinges on a bartender being both literate and extremely proactive.
And this isn’t even the first time this exact flavor of nonsense has been tried recently. Remember The Desperate Hour, the Naomi Watts one from a couple years back, where she’s jogging through the woods when she finds out there’s an active shooter at her son’s school, and she spends the entire runtime on the phone trying to talk her way into fixing an active shooting from several miles away? Same DNA. Ordinary woman, moving through nature or a city on foot, phone glued to her ear, single-handedly out-strategizing professionals in real time. That one landed at 28% on Rotten Tomatoes and 35 on Metacritic, and one critic dinged it for being “a film that is based almost completely on phone conversations,” which, yeah, same problem, just without the lipstick. I actually give that one more grace in that the film makers were trying to get a movie made in the heart of Covid – The Runner didn’t have that constraint.
And Can We Talk About the Actual Lead Performance for a Second
Because the plot being nonsense is one thing, but I’m starting to want to watch this movie again… but this time, making it a rage rewatch. No no, a schadenfreude-fest. Because the acting in this movie is so horrifically bad – so otherworldly disconnected with reality as to send me. After watching this movie, I was listening to a podcast talking about just how bad Gal Gadot’s acting is in this movie and I just found myself violently agreeing. Let’s be clear, this thing is next level bad. Like it could very well be the worst movie of the year. No, no no… it’s already a lock in my mind. It’s definitely the worst film of the year. But I’m actually wondering if this is anything other than the last movie of Gal Gadot’s career.
So I went looking to see if it was just me? Or maybe just a couple of us that thought it was so horrifically bad – but no. There’s an AV Club review out there that states that she has “trouble connecting words, actions, and emotions” as a lead, call her line delivery “inhuman,” and single out a scene where she’s supposed to be angry and it just lands stilted instead. Then they make this genuinely savage little joke almost in passing, that later in the film when the studio drops in some AI generated dubbing of her voice for a technical fix, “there isn’t much difference in delivery” compared to when she’s actually acting. Which actually connects for me. I don’t know if the studio execs used AI dubbing to try and salvage this film… but it mentally checks out for me. It makes the movie make sense.
And here’s the part that made me laugh, Fiction Horizon reviewed it too and landed on a similar complaint, saying her line readings stay “oddly even” even when the stakes are supposed to be unbearable, while a different critic I found earlier said she’s stuck on exactly one note the whole time, “panicked, desperate, sweaty.” So depending which review you grab, she’s either too flat or too one-note, and nobody can agree which, they just all agree something is off. That’s not a good sign for a lead performance. That’s the kind of thing that happens when nobody in the edit bay can figure out what take to use because none of them work.
Regardless – I’ll be honest, I’m getting an unreasonable amount of joy out of this. I have never forgiven Hollywood for the sheer volume of interchangeable comic book blockbusters we all sat through for the better part of a decade, the flattened dialogue, the focus-grouped everything, the way half those movies treated charisma as a replacement for actual craft. The DC comic book chaos and the Marvel miasma… I didn’t like any of it. And if you did enjoy Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman… Just skip a bit brother. But I have to say that the executives that lined up to create an assembly movie and an assembly line lead and an assembly line screenplay?? This is peak Hollywood right here. And to sit back and watch as critics line up to say the emperor has no clothes, on a project she chose specifically to prove she could carry something outside the cape, feels less like a pile-on and more like a long overdue correction.
Final Thoughts on The Runner
I think what’s actually happening here is that everybody remembers that Speed worked and nobody remembers why. Speed worked because the stakes were mechanical and dumb and completely legible, a bus, a speedometer, a bomb, done, your brain never has to do any work to believe it. The second you swap that out for an intricate conspiracy that depends on strangers behaving exactly the way the script needs them to behave, at exactly the right second, with zero coordination and zero rehearsal, you’re not making Speed anymore, you’re making a movie that needs the audience to stop thinking, and audiences these days are extremely willing to keep thinking. Every single one of these movies bets that we won’t ask the obvious question, and every single time, we ask it anyway. Speed was lightning in a bottle, one perfect dumb idea executed with total confidence, and it is time, genuinely, for Hollywood to stop trying to recapture it by making the premise more complicated instead of more disciplined.
