The Runner Movie Review - Absolute Cinema

There's a brand new film on Amazon Prime starring Gal Gadot called The Runner. Not to be confused with Runner which is coming out in two more weeks with Alan Richson. I'm sure they're both going to be equally great. Well I checked out the movie a few hours ago and I'm happy to report it's exactly what I thought it was going to be. But you might be thinking to yourself, Adam is this movie a ah hell yeah or a Kal-El no. Well you're going to have to watch the review to find out right now. It ******* sucked. Okay I kind of gave away the game but it sucked. Now what's amazing about this, I guess we're calling it a film, I think it's more of a product, is it's only an hour and 17 minutes of your time. Not even an hour and 20. You couldn't make it to an hour and 20. I understand 90 minutes is a long time to try to sustain a movie of this quality. But what's nice about the movie is it's short. And what else is nice about the movie is it doesn't feel short. It feels like you are wasting your entire life away watching it and just you know a shave over an hour. Filmed and glorious. Four by three aspect ratio. The director demands your attention. Now this was a choice he made intentionally. He said to himself, I want people pulled in. I want them sucked in from their widescreen world they're living in. To this beautiful gorgeous black barred son of a bitch. And the reason we need to get up front and center with Mrs. Gadot, whether you like it or not, is because it's a frantic film. Always moving. Always shaking and deking and dodging. She's on the run trying to save her little pup who's been kidnapped by a villain. The director wisely wants you to feel claustrophobic and you are absolutely going to feel that misery as you spend what is essentially an eternity with the acting that's on display by Gal Gadot, who is a one-woman army here. Not only is she running her heart out, she's acting it as well. This statue of a woman who I would say is the female equivalent of Tommy Wiseau in term of acting is playing a high powered attorney who pissed off the wrong individual. She ruffled the wrong feathers. She shook the wrong bush. And so now they have taken her kid hostage unless she does them a favor. I say them, but it's really just one mastermind behind all this who has all these tricks up his sleeve. Using the power of AI, he can convince her that her son's on the phone. He can make her think that she's hearing her own voice when in fact it's just technology. And that's going to be a kind of a commentary at play throughout this movie is how awful technology is and how people are addicted to their smartphones and how they need to just get out and touch grass. It's powerful stuff. No one's ever thought of this before, especially in running format. So here's what you're in for. This is the treat you get to experience. Not only do we have the black bars on the side with the 4x3 aspect ratio that made me take off the TV and go to my computer to confirm that was in fact a choice they made intentionally. It was. They also put like this soft focus blur on it. Like you're watching an old episode of Red Shoe Diaries in the middle of the night, hoping your dad doesn't come downstairs and see you jerking it under the blanket. That was oddly specific and definitely not tied to something I did as a child. Armed with the shoes of the gods, aka Nike's, and a playlist straight from your mom's 1990s mixtape, our femme fatale runs with the speed of a gazelle, has the legs of a black winged stilt, and the ass of a charcuterie board. Gal Gadot is the runner. I'll be running. I'll be running till the love runs out. Till the love runs out. Yeah, I'm running down a dream. Baby, I was born to run. Runner. Feel the runner. Lightning and the runner. That's not right. That's not how those lyrics go at all. A lot of people don't know this about runners, but they have a thing called runner vision. It's kind of a superpower. And this is really shown in the film. It was an eye opener for me for the first time watching it. Let me get out my brushes and paint you something on the canvas here that is this flick. We open with Gadot taking a couple phone calls. She kisses her little boy. The acting is chef's kiss. And he goes off to school. She's going to do her morning jog as she always does to the office. She gets her playlist going. She starts to go on our merry way and then. Yes. Hello. Who is this? And then some douchey British guy says, I've got your son, bitch. If you want to get him back, you got to play a game, brah. This is exactly he doesn't sound anything like that. But the story is here. It's a Simon Says situation from Die Hard 3. It's a pop quiz hot shot from Speed. Really, these are all the same movie at the end of the day, outside of the fact that the runner is absolute dog ----, terrible. And those movies are amazing. He is going to demand that she listened to his every single request. And if he doesn't, that little kid that he stole, he's going bye bye. She wants to see his kid again. Too bad. He's going bye bye. So she needs to get to him. And so some of the ground rules are this. And they are simple. Number one, you got to always be moving. Kind of like the bomb on the bus and speed. You got to keep that thunder cooking. That's not an expression. Number two, you better sure as ---- not get in a car. All I'm thinking the whole time is why not, dude? You call her an Uber. You get over to the location. You kill the guy and it's over. Location short for location, of course. Because that's really at the end of the day what he wants. He needs her to go to a location at a hotel where a key witness is staying. And she's got to put some bullets in that bitch. And then she gets her son back. But guess what? On top of this, there's the simple elegant fact that her son's going to die in less than an hour. This is a 24 situation now, friends. And that timer is going to be on the clock constantly. Telling you how much is left of this film. Those are my favorite types of movies. When it's constantly reminding you, hey, you still have to sit through 35 more minutes of this. Enjoy the show, jackass. The boy is, I believe, diabetic. And his glucose levels are incredibly low. We're running 30% or something. I don't know. Maybe it's gluten levels. I'm sure I can't remember or care to find out. So she needs to get to him before he's dead. Time is of the essence. And so she's going to do a light jog through most of this movie. I'm going to get to my son. I will find him! Some of the key favorite scenes. I suppose there's spoilers in this. Nobody's watching this movie except for me. I'm pretty sure this is a tax write-off somehow. Right out of the gates, within the first 20 minutes, we really set the table for what's to come in terms of the action moments. This is truly one of the greatest action scenes I've ever seen in my life put to cinema. She's jogging down a dirt path. And she's got to keep moving, right? Or consequences. Except for there's never consequences. She breaks all these rules several times and nothing happens. But she's jogging. And there's a group of a gaggle of old ladies in front of her. And she's like, I could tell them to move. But using my runner powers. She zones in on the corner of a bench. And then they show her hop up on the bench. Tip the hat at the ladies as she's going by. Hop down on the other side. This was seriously presented like it was Tony Hawk pulling a 900 off. Just insane. In another sequence, she is trying to figure out how to get the message to the cops. So she starts stealing phones from people. And then the phones are locked. So she's like, oh, ****. Throws it in the water. And the girl's like, bitch, why didn't you just give it back? She's running on other things, ruining everybody's day. She's pushing bikers over. Sometimes I think it's for no reason. She just gets her kicks out of it. Anyway, she grabs a phone. Finally, she starts trying to text. And they're showing the text coming up. And it's like that. I can't I can't type. And she's erasing things and trying again. And all I'm thinking is just slow down for a second. Just slow down. All the guy has to see and monitor her from a distance is like a little ping. He's watching her on a map. And so it's not like it's really going to make much of a difference if she just kind of like walks fast and does it. But she can't figure it out. And then she trips and the phone goes into the water. And at this point, I'm like, just let the kid die. Who cares? Just just just die. We then get to the subway section of the movie where she goes on to a subway. And it's now going like 15 miles an hour on the dude's pinging app. He goes, you're cheating, aren't you? You're you're cheating. I swear to God, if you're cheating. And she goes, I'm not cheating. I don't. I don't cheat. Kal-El, no. Remember? Remember that? Nothing happens. There's no consequences. She could have drove a car to the hotel and would have had this over. And, you know, like too sweet. Lickety split. She gets her phone taken by some local thugs. They show her. She's like, no, I need the phone. You fucks. God, the subway takes off. So now activating super powerful running power. She starts going fast. And she's running upstairs, jumping over things, moving out of the way. And she somehow catches up to this subway. The woman's like the flash. She kind of runs like him, too. The Ezra Miller flash. And yeah, so she gets onto the subway. And this is my favorite scene in the movie. I've had several favorite scenes, by the way. She's on the subway. There's security in there. One guy's moving towards her. And out of nowhere, he stops and goes, hit the brakes, hit the brakes. Why? He's got her cornered. And he decides in his infinite wisdom to slam the brakes, causing everybody to slam forward. And then she's just like, bye, fuckers. And she goes out the back and starts hopscotching on the rails because she doesn't want to touch the dirt or I don't know, because she could trip. So she's like, I'm going on the I'm staying on the tracks. It's like, don't touch the lava. The floor is lava sort of a thing. And this leads to a favorite part. Number eight of mine, where a subway starts coming at her. A train is coming at her. She goes up against the fence and she's like, wipe out. It's awesome. It's pure cinema. The crescendo of this whole fiasco ends on a bridge. The London Bridge, as a matter of fact, it's an iconic location. So, of course, we put it in this film. The movie takes place in London, if that wasn't clear. These are the things you get from this channel. Subscribe. She's on the bridge. She's surrounded by people. And she has to think fast because her kids life is hanging in the balance. She's got to go shoot some dude. So he can't be the key witness to put some mobsters in jail or something. Who knows? And so she jumps off the bridge and somehow lands on a boat. It looked like a long ass drop, but it did nothing to affect her at all. Her legs still work fine. Everything's intact. And she's on her way again. And so she finally gets to the hotel. She goes up to the room on floor 50s. Who cares? She gets the gun. She shoots the key witness and saves the day. She gets her son back. But it turns out... Here's some spoilers. If we haven't been in spoiler territory yet, we're in spoilers now. For the one person that's excited for the runner. It turns out this thing was all a ruse. It was all a trick of the trade. She is such a brilliant attorney. She knows how to make people think things that aren't actually real. I'd like to think that she's an attorney only for criminals. And she's got an awful lot of bad people. But that's beside. That's a story for another day. Maybe for the runner too. Cruise control. She pretended to kill the guy. Because what turns out actually happened is as she was doing her runs. She texted on a phone and gave it to a stranger. And she's just like... The stranger got the note that he needed to call the cops. Tell him what was going on as much as he knew. Which was basically just, you know, there's people chasing me. My son's in danger. Then she took a lipstick and wrote out this perfect long-ass message on a glass window. As opposed to a wood window, I guess. Explaining what needs to happen next. Which is go to the hotel. We're going to fake the murder of my key witness. You're going to put some blood packs on. You're going to put blanks in a gun. You're going to store that gun in the elevator. I'm going to get that thing. Pop in the blanks. Get my son back. And then the bad guy's going to think, mission accomplished. The film ends with her going downstairs. Reuniting with her son. Seeing the villain who's dressed up as a paramedic. He looks over. The son's like, mama, that's the guy, mama. And Gal Gadot turns over, sees him. Puts a little crinkle in her face. You thought that I killed the guy, but I did not kill the guy. And then he looks up and he sees that the witness has survived. And he looks back at Gal Gadot, who points her gun at him. Boom! And a blank fires. Indicating that she was 10 steps ahead of this piece of ---- the whole time. And he's just like, I gotta give it to you. I gotta hand it to you. You got me. You really got me. And then they handcuff him and take him away. And that's the movie. But it was built up like there was going to be this huge, big final thing. Because there was, you know, he had a contingency plan. He showed that he had some acme dynamite on him the whole time. That way he was going to use. But he never used it. He never used the acme dynamite. It was just a tease. It was a misdirect. And it was brilliant. Because the music was building up. It was pounding. It was heart throbbing. Like some huge thing was about to happen. But then nothing happened. It's perfect. It's my favorite kind of movie. It's like edging. It's like getting to that climax. But then never being able to achieve it. Which is now, sadly, the only way I can achieve climax. It's weird. I am a weird person. And this was a weird movie. How it exists is beyond words. I can't even comprehend. I can't fathom how this went from paper to screenplay to final product. It's mind numbingly insane to me. But that's where we're at in life. Everything just comes out. Nobody remembers it in a day. There will be like two people that defend the movie and say I'm a jackass. But let's be honest. No one's watching The Runner. Okay, this is shovelware. This is crap they put out to keep the catalog moving on these streaming services. Oh, Netflix has The Last House. Well, we have The Runner. And then they're going to get The Construction Guy. And then we're going to get The Horse. And then they're going to get, you know, it just keeps going. It's never ending. And they get a big name attached. They pay them a bunch of money. And people foolishly think it's going to be good. And then they don't watch it. But I do. All right. There you have it. The Runner with Gal Gadot. I mean, you know, to be fair, it's everything I thought it would be. It really is. It's everything I thought it would be and more. All right. Let me know if you actually wasted your time watching this. Please think of subbing to the show. Adam Does Movies. I'm on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you watch or listen, you can find me. I've also been putting a lot of exclusive content on Instagram and Facebook. So if you want to follow me there, you can as well. And I would appreciate it. All right. Now, if you excuse me, I think I need to take a little run. Oh, kill me. And I ran, I ran so far away. ------- get away. Thanks again for watching the video. If you didn't know, I'm a one-man operation here at Adam Does Movies. I also have a full-time job. I got a family to take care of. And I would absolutely love if you supported me on Patreon.com slash Adam Does Movies like these beautiful people did here. These are the silver and gold members. There's also a bronze membership starting at $1 plus access to over 300 videos from the Adam Vault at any support level. I would really appreciate it. It's the best way to support the show. Hope to see you there.