WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON RUNNER?
A movie like Runner isn’t one you go into with the highest of hopes. Its premise feels lifted directly from a lower-end Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer production from the 90s. The trailers were a whole bunch of fast-paced nonsense. It also doesn’t help that the last movie its director Scott Waugh made was the astonishingly awful Expend4bles. Plus, who honestly wants to see the guy from Reacher teamed up with the comparatively feebler Owen Wilson?
But despite everything going against it, Runner surprises by being much more decent than it has any right to be. By no means is it a new action classic, nor is it even one that you’ll probably want to rewatch more than once or twice, but it fits the bill of being a big, bombastic spectacle with no real pretence to itself and plenty of hardcore violence to satisfy the most basic of genre expectations.
Taking place in Brisbane, Australia, we follow US migrant Hank Malone (Alan Ritchson) who, following a bout of grief and addiction, makes a living as a courier performing menial tasks throughout the city. One day, he receives an assignment to pick up a highly valuable package from the airport: a healthy liver, intended for a dying young girl in a Gold Coast hospital. But the solitary Hank is displeased to find that he is also expected to transport the liver’s much more extroverted escort Ben Bishop (Wilson), and even more so when the two of them are quickly targeted by deranged cartel boss Damian Zaldívar (Rodrigo Santoro), who want the liver for their own nefarious purposes. So begins a high-pressure chase through the Queensland area as Hank and Ben try to stay alive whilst delivering the liver on time, whilst Damian and his henchmen mercilessly slaughter any unfortunate soul who happens to get in their way.
Aesthetically, Runner is deeply generic in how much it looks and feels like an action movie. It’s got everything from rapid-fire editing to long, swooping establishing shots to even the occasional bit of CGI-coated violence, all of which could feel redundant and even boring in less capable hands. But Waugh, working from a script by Miles Hubley and Tommy White, shows an unexpected smoothness in executing such a familiar aesthetic, with the camera remaining tightly focused on the action itself which allows the stunt work to actually be watchable amidst the high-octane pacing of it all, all while the director maintains a steady tone that gently fluctuates between gruesome carnage and goofy buddy comedy with impressive naturality. The direction, while not groundbreaking, is competent enough to make you wonder: this is seriously from the Expend4bles guy? And he could have made this kind of action movie this whole time?!
A movie that, for something distributed (in the US, at least) by Angel Studios – which is known for its relatively safe and often faith-based output – is shockingly violent. You’ll have scenes where people, including innocent bystanders, are swiftly shot in the head, while henchmen get killed with the spikes of a car headrest and the active wheel of a crashed police cruiser, among other things, in a film where the main objective is to save the life of a young child. In that sense, the script does embrace its own sheer stupidity, even with how over-the-top evil its villains are, but never to a point where it transforms into an outright self-mocking comedy, for while there are moments where you’re definitely meant to laugh – mainly at the Midnight Run-like banter between Ritchson and a delightfully charismatic Wilson – it knows when and how to treat certain heavy developments with a fair amount of emotional intelligence. It just happens to have scenes of rapid gunfire and exploding vehicles spliced in between it all.
In terms of anything that truly holds it back, there are a couple of moments where the film becomes a bit too corny for its own good. For instance, anytime we cut to the dying young girl in the hospital with her amusingly desperate mother (Leila George) by her bedside, it’s almost unintentionally hilarious. This sudden shift into overly cheesy territory after a whole bunch of testosterone-fuelled action amusingly makes it feel like the makers of Ordinary Angels – the only other Alan Ritchson-featuring Angel Studios movie about a young girl needing a liver transplant in existence – suddenly took control of the production, cramming in a bunch of cloying dialogue and a dramatic musical score to make these scenes as cutesy and manipulative as possible in order to make the audience want our heroes to succeed all the more. To a point, it feels like Runner is aware of how unsubtle it is with all of that, but it does arrive at a stage where you’re not sure if it’s entirely meant to be taken ironically, especially when the film also drops some hints of a more faith-based movie lurking underneath the carnage.
Yet, it’s hard to deny that Runner is a fine bit of mindless action entertainment, with its well-executed if ludicrous action sequences and stable tonal shifts making it a hardcore thrill ride with a heart of gold. Admittedly, that heart can sometimes get in its own way, but not to a point where it derails the entire thing, leaving it something that – again, for everything going against it – is more enjoyable than anyone might be expecting.
