SPOILER-FREE PLOT SUMMARY
Prosecuting attorney Maia Martin (played by Gal Gadot) has a big court appearance on her docket later in the day as she’s set to bring in a star witness in a case against a crime boss. Being a single mom, she drops her diabetic son Noah (Rory Wilmot, in his feature film debut) off at school and then, to get her mind right, goes for a run. While in the park, she gets a call from her son’s phone. As a parent, she naturally assumes he forgot something at home but it’s actually his kidnapper on the other end. The mysterious voice tells her, unless she kills her star witness within the hour, Noah will be given a lethal dose from his insulin pump. The rules are Maia must run the five miles to her destination so he can track her, she can’t speak to anyone other than him and cannot contact the police. After she’s hit by a car, she takes the risk to jump on the subway in an effort to make up time. When she gets off at her stop, the call suddenly disconnects and she realizes her phone’s been stolen. Now she has to waste all the time she made back up by running to the next stop and confronting the thieves to retrieve her phone. Somehow, she makes it and attacks the thugs, immediately drawing the attention of authorities. Now Maia is on the police’s radar, further complicating her issue. Can she make it to the hotel in order to save her son? What will happen to the star witness? Is she even the kind of person who can kill someone?
SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
A movie that so desperately wants to be clever, THE RUNNER is nothing more than somebody’s paycheck.
While she’s not the world’s greatest actor, Gadot is typically underrated. She gets a bad wrap but, mostly, it’s because of the projects she chooses. Sadly, THE RUNNER will not help combat that.
She’s believable here as a single mom trying to protect her son and the audience can certainly buy into the idea that she’s in shape enough to run long distances. This is, once again, more an example of the project letting her down rather than her giving an underwhelming performance.
There are just so many problems here. There are cheap manufactured jump scares like dogs barking and car horns, the alleged sexting photos don’t even try to convince the audience that they’re of the lead actor, paramedics don’t remove her earbuds so she can still conveniently talk to the antagonist while laying in an ambulance, the audience is insulted by the constant use of the “I’ve gotta run” phrase, somebody gets pistol whipped but suffers no injury, there’s a train coming — in a tunnel, no less — and she doesn’t hear it until she needs to dramatically jump out of the way, there’s a strict rule about following the rules or her son will die but, suddenly, “rules are meant to be broken,” and so on and so on. There are too many problems to name, really.
And then there’s the directing, the over abundance of a “fractured glass” effect is clearly a visual substitute for the lack of momentum, the random one frame per second slo mo scenes play like a bad 90’s music video and I guess criminals are using 1980’s keyboards now.
Nothing about this movie makes sense. It’s almost like writer Mark Gibson had a really cool idea where a single mom would be on a literal run, away from her child, during a kidnapping and we, the audience, wouldn’t see the whole picture until the end. Fine. Nothing award winning but fine. A fun flight of fancy to be sure. But the execution is so poor that it feels like a DVD you’d find while sifting through a dump bin at Walmart.
THE RUNNER is a nice reminder of how great movies have been this calendar year because this is not the quality we’ve been accustomed to in 2026. What a complete waste of time, even for fans of Gadot.
JKG SCORE: 4.0 out of 10
