At some point, we need to sit all the Hollywood movie villains down and explain that when they’re hired to do a job, they’re the ones who are supposed to do it. Bad guys like Jason Bateman in “Carry-On,” Charlize Theron in “The Fate of the Furious” and now Damian Lewis in “The Runner” always insist on kidnapping an innocent person’s family and forcing the hero to commit the crime for them, and that’s just bad crime. Not evil crime, although it’s that too, but bad crime. Crime that they’re bad at.
In “The Runner,” Lewis kidnaps Gal Gadot’s son. And, unless she kills the star witness in a murder trial, her son’s going to die. Lewis doesn’t spring this on her when she’s near the witness, he springs it when she’s all the way across London on her morning jog. She has one hour to commit the murder – and he tells her she has to run the whole distance, which means a million unpredictable things can happen along the way. Also, it gives her oodles of time to come up with a plan to stop the bad guy. Which, of course, she’ll try to do.
The villain in “The Runner” thinks they have a foolproof scheme but all their intricate, high-tech planning does is create a chaotic situation he can’t possibly control. And, on some level, he knows that, because his back-up plan is an old-fashioned Wile E. Coyote-looking bomb, which would have killed a lot more people but — if we look at this from the villain’s perspective, and from the perspective of whoever hired him — would actually have worked.
It’s not fair to judge a movie entirely on logical terms. Not usually. The rules change when the film revolves entirely around a plan the villain claims is perfect, but makes slightly less sense than a steam-powered rutabaga. Then again, lots of movies have silly plots, and a silly plot is entirely forgivable if the audience gets swept up in the characters and their plight. All you need is a talented star and a propulsive pace, which would compensate for most of the deficiencies in “The Runner.”
Bad news: Gal Gadot stars in this movie and she’s never convincing. Her first line of dialogue is about how she’s nervous about the trial today and she couldn’t sound less nervous if the director told her to. She’s about as emotionless as an actor can possibly get. Granted, she looks upset after her son gets kidnapped, but she’s only got two levels of upset and she mostly sticks to the first one, which isn’t upset enough given her circumstances. This is a movie about a person who’s literally forced to run for their son’s life, and she spends most of it doing a brisk scamper, which doesn’t make her look invested.
Compare Gadot’s run to Tom Cruise’s epic sprint in “Mission: Impossible III” or Franka Potente’s mad dash in “Run Lola Run.” Those are characters responding to life and death situations with an appropriate degree of urgency. There’s one scene in “The Runner” where Gadot has to run from one subway stop to the next before the subway arrives, and that’s when director Kevin Macdonald pulls out all the stops, speeding along the city streets, cutting the frame rate to amplify her sensation of panic. It’s an exhilarating sequence, but it only calls more attention to how much more thrilling the rest of the movie could be.
“The Runner” isn’t much of a thriller. It isn’t much of a movie. It would, however, be a hilarious episode of “Taskmaster.” Just replace Lewis with Little Alex Horne and Gal Gadot with almost anybody and you’d have a winner on your hands. “Get to the London courthouse in one hour. You cannot drive a car or use public transportation. Your time starts now.” And then they get there and realize if they’d read the back of the instructions they could have used a helicopter, which was behind them the whole time.
All the information is, as always, on the task. But if you’re looking for entertainment, and you’re watching “The Runner,” it won’t be on screen.
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