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Gal Gadot jogs into people for an entire hour in The Runner

A runner is held hostage over the phone in Amazon's ridiculous, boneheaded thriller. Thankfully, it's hilarious.

By Jacob Oller | September 2, 2026 | 12:00am

Photo: Amazon MGM Studios

Film Reviews Gal Gadot

Gal Gadot jogs into people for an entire hour in The Runner

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’s 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’t all so unintentionally amusing—falling just short of Amazon’s good-bad masterpiece War Of The Worlds from last year—it’d 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.

However, to fully immerse yourself in The Runner, you must avoid accidentally turning it off because you think you’ve 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—more like something that interrupts your streaming movie than the actual thing you’re trying to watch. It’s 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’s not long until Maia, who’s 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.

The caller doesn’t 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’d otherwise testify against his criminal employer. Sometimes, though, he asks Maia to be mean to her acquaintances, just because. It’s 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’ve got their noses buried in their newfangled cellular phones. While director Kevin Macdonald (The Mauritanian) 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.

But those brief glances at other people—and shadowy, uncanny close-ups of Lewis’ lips and fingernails—can 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’s folder of tasteful non-nude selfies, it lets us enjoy a breathless Gadot angrily enunciate, “You perv. You freakin’ perv!”) 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.

It is, however, much funnier. It seems like every minute or so, Maia crashes headlong into another pedestrian, or tries to steal someone’s phone, or gets hit by a car. She’s constantly whacking people and taking weird routes; it’s 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’t solve by, well, more running. (With one exception: In a laugh-out-loud moment, it becomes clear that Maia isn’t 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.

What The Runner doesn’t bother explaining, or keeping consistent, is its villain’s 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, there isn’t much difference in delivery), when it suits the plot, he’s blind to her actions and easily fooled. Then, when the story dictates, he’s 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’s not sure what all this stuff is capable of, but it sure doesn’t like any of it. Add in a truly soapy B-plot involving what happened to Maia’s own parents when she was a kid, and you’ve got a shaggy mess shoved into a high-concept container, like a wad of hair clogging a drain.

The Runner is a bit like the goofy denim bucket hat Maia dons late in the film, ostensibly as a disguise. It’s completely ineffective when it comes to its intentions, but its failures are easy to enjoy. From the score, which interpolates, of all things, “The Entertainer,” 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’s not even the only bad mom-jogging thriller with a missing kid named Noah) with the stamina of a true glutton for punishment.

Director: Kevin Macdonald
Writer: Mark Gibson
Starring: Gal Gadot, Damian Lewis
Release Date: September 2, 2026 (Amazon)

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