{"id":833897,"date":"2026-09-02T07:40:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T07:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/833897\/"},"modified":"2026-09-02T07:40:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T07:40:09","slug":"the-runner-review-gal-gadot-thriller-is-a-perfect-hate-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/833897\/","title":{"rendered":"The Runner review: Gal Gadot thriller is a perfect hate watch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some actors get showcases. Gal Gadot gets made an example of. The Runner, an Amazon thriller where she jogs around London for an hour bumping into shit, seems like a punishment, something imposed by a personal trainer for cheating on a diet or by a fantasy sports league for coming in last place. Gadot, who already has enough trouble connecting words, actions, and emotions when she\u2019s not the lead, is basically the only actor on screen for the duration of the film, stuck chatting on a wireless headset with a mysterious criminal holding her hostage. If it wasn\u2019t all so unintentionally amusing\u2014falling just short of Amazon\u2019s good-bad masterpiece War Of The Worlds<\/a> from last year\u2014it\u2019d be more like we were being held hostage. Instead, the long bout of cardio is a delightfully idiotic riff on Phone Booth and its ilk, perfectly obnoxious and exquisitely silly for the right kind of hate-watcher.<\/p>\n

However, to fully immerse yourself in The Runner, you must avoid accidentally turning it off because you think you\u2019ve erroneously clicked on some kind of commercial. The abrasive needledrops and over-saturated drone shots often make The Runner seem like a bright, gleeful ad for psoriasis medication\u2014more like something that interrupts your streaming movie than the actual thing you\u2019re trying to watch. It\u2019s through this unreal world that London lawyer Maia (Gal Gadot) sprints, after the requisite getting-ready exposition with her diabetic son Noah (Rory Wilmot). It\u2019s not long until Maia, who\u2019s been fielding work calls while huffing and puffing, gets a ring from a kidnapper (Damian Lewis), who has her son, the kind of tech-empowered omniscience that villainous callers have in these kinds of movies, and a series of requests for Maia.<\/p>\n

The caller doesn\u2019t want her to talk to anyone else, and wants her to keep hustling on foot across town to get to his main objective: killing a witness in one of her cases, who\u2019d otherwise testify against his criminal employer. Sometimes, though, he asks Maia to be mean to her acquaintances, just because. It\u2019s all part of an odd script from Mark Gibson, which is mostly focused on shaking its boomer-aged fist at all those young people who\u2019ve got their noses buried in their newfangled cellular phones. While director Kevin Macdonald (The Mauritanian<\/a>) slaps together some cheap, quick-cut montages gesturing at the modern surveillance state, he has no feel for the pace or tension needed to keep the energy up in a film like this, throwing in zooms and cutaways to extras on their phones seemingly at random.<\/p>\n

But those brief glances at other people\u2014and shadowy, uncanny close-ups of Lewis\u2019 lips and fingernails\u2014can only take the film away from Gadot for so long. The Runner is only 84 minutes, including credits, but it feels like three or four hours of Gadot chugging along. Part of that is the rock-in-your-shoe dialogue, part of that is her inhuman delivery. (When the caller accesses her phone\u2019s folder of tasteful non-nude selfies, it lets us enjoy a breathless Gadot angrily enunciate, \u201cYou perv. You freakin\u2019 perv!\u201d) And Gadot is no Tom Cruise, King Of Screen Running. The extended workout, either shot so far away that it looks like stock footage or so tight that it loses all sense of context, is never any more exciting than watching Gadot lope on a treadmill.<\/p>\n

It is, however, much funnier. It seems like every minute or so, Maia crashes headlong into another pedestrian, or tries to steal someone\u2019s phone, or gets hit by a car. She\u2019s constantly whacking people and taking weird routes; it\u2019s a bit like watching someone play Grand Theft Auto and sprinting through the streets, smacking NPCs left and right as they pursue their next objective. She runs on subway tracks and out of the back of an ambulance, never running into a problem she can\u2019t solve by, well, more running. (With one exception: In a laugh-out-loud moment, it becomes clear that Maia isn\u2019t great at texting on the move.) Maia sustaining a head injury halfway through the film does, at least, offer an explanation for why its main character is like that.<\/p>\n

What The Runner doesn\u2019t bother explaining, or keeping consistent, is its villain\u2019s powers of control. While he initially has complete access to Maia, seeing all and hearing all, even replicating her voice via AI (ironically, given recent news<\/a>, there isn\u2019t much difference in delivery), when it suits the plot, he\u2019s blind to her actions and easily fooled. Then, when the story dictates, he\u2019s back in control, his guy-in-the-chair routine once again jacking him into the panopticon. Here the script has the same relationship with computers as it does with phones: It\u2019s not sure what all this stuff is capable of, but it sure doesn\u2019t like any of it. Add in a truly soapy B-plot involving what happened to Maia\u2019s own parents when she was a kid, and you\u2019ve got a shaggy mess shoved into a high-concept container, like a wad of hair clogging a drain.<\/p>\n

The Runner is a bit like the goofy denim bucket hat Maia dons late in the film, ostensibly as a disguise. It\u2019s completely ineffective when it comes to its intentions, but its failures are easy to enjoy. From the score, which interpolates, of all things, \u201cThe Entertainer,\u201d to a ridiculous run-in that a bloodied Maia has with a priest, to all the different ways that Maia tries to steal phones from passers-by, the sweaty hour of silliness approaches a familiar premise (it\u2019s not even the only bad mom-jogging thriller<\/a> with a missing kid named Noah) with the stamina of a true glutton for punishment.<\/p>\n

Director: Kevin Macdonald
Writer: Mark Gibson
Starring: Gal Gadot, Damian Lewis
Release Date: September 2, 2026 (Amazon)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some actors get showcases. Gal Gadot gets made an example of. The Runner, an Amazon thriller where she…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":833898,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[88],"class_list":["post-833897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=833897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/833898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=833897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=833897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=833897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}