Gal Gadot’s The Runner is a Trainwrec

This video will contain spoilers. It's been a little over a year since Amazon Prime released its bizarre new take on War of the Worlds, which mainly featured Ice Cube reacting to stuff behind computer screens. So I guess it's about time for another low-budget thriller from them to get absolutely decimated by movie critics. Right on cue we have The Runner, where War of the Worlds was defined by its, uh, stationary lead. The Runner is all about motion. Gal Gadot plays a high-powered London attorney whose son is kidnapped and held hostage while she's taking a jog. What follows is a small-scale but very fast-paced movie where Gadot must rush to a hotel to take out a witness testifying against a mob boss before the kid's time runs out. In a way, this is very standard stuff. The kind of high-concept thriller that dominated the box office in the 90s and often goes straight to streaming these days. But there's just something about The Runner that's special, and not in a good way. Gal Gadot's performance, some very bizarre direction and editing choices, and a last-minute twist that's so ridiculous and so desperate to try to appear clever, that it makes an already pretty terrible movie even worse in retrospect. I just can't help but want to dig into it a little more. Where else can I start with this? It has to be Gal Gadot. On paper, this is a movie that's well within her wheelhouse. Having made her name as Wonder Woman and in stuff like Netflix's Red Notice, a low-ish budget thriller seems like a fine fit. She's got the athleticism for the role and a sense of physicality that helps when so much of what she's doing is, like, getting hit by cars and sprinting through crowds. The thing is, though, despite taking place all over the city of London, this is a highly, highly contained movie character-wise. The entire thing lives and dies on the back and forth between her character and the evil guy on the phone. Like, she's talking to him in almost every scene. Their conversations, both intense and very personal, is what the movie hinges on. If it's gonna work at all, that dynamic absolutely has to be compelling. And the villain is up for it. They got Damien Lewis, who you may know from Homeland, Billions, or Band of Brothers. You don't see his face until the last few minutes, but he's really able to deliver just by talking on that phone call. The menace you would expect is there, but he's bringing more to the table than that. He's got a real interest in her, and a surprising tenderness at times that makes him feel even creepier. It's not a super well-realized character or anything. This is not that movie. But with what he's given, it's about as well executed as you could hope for. That is not the case with Gal Gadot. Wonder Woman, with its big superhero spectacle and fish-out-of-water premise, now seems like it was expertly built around her severe limitations as an actor, intentional or not. Placed outside of that context, she's usually pretty bad. But a movie like Red Notice does not have to count on her playing inner turmoil well to work. The Runner does. Yes, this is a goofy thriller, but I actually think that it would be a challenging role for anyone. The thing I keep hearing about the film is that it's just Gal Gadot running the entire time. And yeah, on the surface that's true, but what's being asked of her is a lot more than that. Over the course of the movie, she has to establish this relationship with the villain, where she hates him but also depends on his knowledge. And he really shares in her victories and setbacks while she's on her way to the hotel. She has to open up about murdering her own father and make peace with the fact that it's why she stayed away from real romantic attachment for her entire life. And she has to do this while, yes, also running for basically the entire movie. Now, Gal Gadot can run very convincingly. The rest... it's a problem. All I want is honesty. What happened to your father? What should be major emotional beats of the film, moments where she's admitting things to this guy that she's never even been able to admit to herself, don't land at all because Gadot is so flat and one note that even when her character is supposed to be opening up, it almost reads like she's lying and kind of poorly too. And that relationship, that camaraderie that needs to emerge between her and this guy that she hates, but who is also with her for the most stressful hour of her life, just never materializes. I kept thinking afterwards, like, is there someone you could place in this role where the movie would actually kind of work? The answer is no, not really, because the final twist is so bad it would prevent that. But if you slot in like Rose Byrne, someone who is an accomplished enough actor to really sell everything this character goes through, it would at least elevate it to a bad movie with some memorable high points. With Gal Gadot at its center, we have a bunch of really awkward line readings, and an actor that doesn't even approach the level of talent you need to pull off a script that asks a lot of its lead. For such a simple movie, this character is dealing with a lot of shifting emotional stakes, and it calls for someone who can actually show us that. So real quick, I am taking questions for my next Patreon Q&A. That first one is available now, so check out that link below, sign up, you can watch that video which is over 30 minutes long, and while you're there, ask me anything that's on your mind. Okay, so let's get to that twist now, because it was so insane I could not believe what I was watching. It's also so intricate that it's kind of hard to even explain. Like, let's back it up to the concept of the movie for a second. Like, let's be clear, this is a very stupid premise. The villain is demanding this lawyer sprint across town to shoot someone in the most convoluted way possible. But for this kind of movie, that's not that big of a deal. Like, Speed has a really goofy premise, and that's easily one of my favorite action movies of the 90s. But how this story resolves is just unforgivable. She sneaks past police, holds an officer at gunpoint, jumps from a bridge onto a boat, threatens that boat's crew, reaches the hotel, and finally makes it upstairs to the witness. Then she shoots the guy and saves her son, who it turns out has been in the hotel the entire time. Now for a second, it looked like it could be a downer ending. Like, she saved her son, but her life is ruined. She's killed a man, acted like a lunatic waving a gun around while people livestream her, and then she winds up staying at the scene of the crime. I was wondering, how is she going to get out of this? How is she possibly going to explain everything that's happened? Could anyone believe her? Did she sacrifice her entire life for her son? Uh, no, actually. Because the twist is that Gal Gadot has been leaving covert messages for her co-workers who somehow arrange a fake assassination with the police and the witness before she arrives. So this means that in 15, maybe 20 minutes, they were able to arrange this elaborate deception that involved getting everyone on board and rigging the witness with movie quality squibs under his jacket. So when she shoots him, it looks convincing to Damian Lewis. I guess they just had these squibs laying around or got some like very expedited shipping. It's all so stupid. And it turns out the police also knew about this and were totally fine with it. Why did they make it so hard to get into the building if they knew about the plan already? Now I am not usually like a big plot hole nitpicking guy, but this is not paper thin. This is like paper that disintegrates in your hand the second you touch it. Anyway, she's able to identify Damian Lewis as he's sneaking out of the hotel, which again, I have to remind you, he is at the same location as the guy he wants dead. So he is a tech savvy, ultra experienced, badass operator who has a bomb rigged to blow as a backup plan. And he's only got an hour before the witness is taken away. Why he needed a plan that forced a middle aged lawyer to run across the city for an hour causing a massive scene instead of using his spy skills to take this guy out is beyond me. Security doesn't even look that tight. Why did he do any of this? The last 10 minutes of The Runner take it from a contrived thriller that I was willing to suspend my disbelief for to just a pure fever dream. The screenplay feels like it was written during an exam where the writer saw they just had like three minutes to wrap it all up. It's terrible. But okay, maybe some great and stylish directing could paper over some of these massive shortcomings. And I will say this for The Runner, it is not edited and presented in that bland streaming style, but it's not good either. Kevin MacDonald has directed bigger projects before, like The Last King of Scotland and Oscar winning documentaries. So I am not sure what happened here. You can tell that MacDonald was trying as hard as he could to not make the constant running in the film boring with a constant use of shaky cam and adding a lot of different effects to show how tired the lead is. Too many, honestly, way too many. The result is like someone trying to emulate Paul Greengrass's work on the Bourne movies, not totally thinking they pulled it off and then over editing it to help to the point where it comes off as amateurish at times, like a film student realizing how many editing plugins they could use and just trying to shove them all in there. Now, it's not always an ugly movie, and there's probably something to be said for how much it tries to embrace its London setting instead of just making this feel like a generic city. But the results are uneven and often very distracting. I doubt The Runner is destined to live in the same infamy as War of the Worlds. It doesn't have nearly as many scenes that are funny and bizarre out of context, but on almost every level, especially its lead and its script, it's just notably egregious. Like, I can get on board with a fast-paced thriller using a ridiculous premise to try to generate suspense in a tight 90-minute movie, but everything about this one, aside from Damian Lewis, who honestly should look into getting a new agent, is painful. And it all adds up to what has to be one of the worst movies of 2026. Here's a special tip for the fellas and girls who have not already joined Captain Midnight's new 1940 flight patrol. You'd better hurry up and join at once, because there's a big adventure ahead. The thing to do now is to get started, because we're going to have not only barrels of fun, but loads of free gifts and prizes too.