\n
The Runner<\/em><\/u> debuts on Prime Video on September 2.<\/em><\/p>\nIf you\u2019re looking for 84 minutes (with credits!) of Gal Gadot running through the streets of London in a desperate bid to save her son from a ruthless, anonymous villain, all while said baddie plays mind games with Gadot\u2019s character via the true villain of the piece \u2013 the dreaded cellphone \u2013 then you\u2019re in luck, because The Runner is on Prime Video now, just waiting for you to half pay attention while\u2026 scrolling through your feeds on your phone, probably.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nThe film stars the former Wonder Woman<\/u> as Maia Marten, one of those super-powerful, super-smart, super-hot lawyers that movies and TV shows are always shoving at us. As the film starts, we learn that Maia has managed to nail down a key witness in the murder trial of a notorious crime boss. And now she\u2019s being blackmailed by a mysterious \u201cCaller,\u201d as he\u2019s called in the credits, to use her status as a super-powerful\/super-smart\/super-hot lawyer to get to that witness and murder him, thereby ensuring that the crime boss goes free. Easy peasy, right?<\/p>\n
Using Maia\u2019s kidnapped son Noah (Rory Wilmot) as the carrot and <\/em>the stick, the Caller forces our heroine to take on this job, but in one of The Runner\u2019s several cracks in logic, for some reason he\u2019s forcing her to do so on the clock, so she has to literally turn her morning run into a run for her son\u2019s life, sprinting across London for most of the film and finding herself in increasingly dangerous and, at times, outlandish situations. (As soon as Maia mentions that Noah\u2019s diabetic, in an awkward opening scene that is clearly all ADR\u2019d<\/u>, we were clearly in for a Chekhov’s Insulin situation.)<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard not to like Gadot, no matter what role she\u2019s playing, and she gives The Runner her all.
\u201c<\/span><\/span><\/div>\nIt\u2019s hard not to like Gadot, no matter what role she\u2019s playing \u2013 that \u201cImagine\u201d<\/u> fracas from a few years back notwithstanding \u2013 and she gives The Runner her all, even as she seems to be slowly running into permanent straight-to-streaming status. Certainly she sells Maia\u2019s determination to save her son, as well as the character\u2019s interior conflict regarding what she has to do in order to accomplish that first thing. Gadot does get an occasional laugh line, as she\u2019s forced to do what the Caller says, even if that means calling a fellow mom who didn\u2019t invite Noah to her kid\u2019s birthday party a \u201cbitch.\u201d Meanwhile, an attempt at some back story complexity for Maia involving her own mother\u2019s dark past doesn\u2019t amount to much in the end, but that\u2019s a failure of the script rather than the actress.<\/p>\n
Nor does The Runner have a satisfying answer to how Maia can resolve her conundrum. \u201cI\u2019m not a killer,\u201d she tells the Caller, and yet she must kill in order to save her boy. The film resorts to fairly ridiculous means to sort out this mess at its climax, which places it in the realm of something along the lines of an unsatisfying Columbo wrap-up as we\u2019re told who did what when and how. Along the way, director Kevin Macdonald (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland) and scripter Mark Gibson seem to also be trying to comment on the state of the world today, a place where cellphones are ubiquitous and, I dunno, bad?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nThis shot of Damian Lewis watching Gal Gadot running is almost definitely not in the actual movie.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/output><\/p>\n
Macdonald does stage some engaging set pieces for Gadot as she constantly has to plow through pedestrians in order to get to her destination on time. Over the course of the film she finds herself running over bridges, onto boats, in front of cars, onto the London tube, over kiosks, and so on and so on. Intermixed with this action is flashes of the Caller, as well as the occasional voyeuristic glimpse of other folks in the city and what they\u2019re saying and texting on their phones. As for the Caller himself, while he hacks into Maia\u2019s phone and uses her most private information for his own ends, we never learn anything about him at all. That he\u2019s played by Billions and Homeland\u2019s Damian Lewis, even if the actor is mostly heard and rarely seen, makes this latter point all the more glaring, as he ultimately feels wasted in the role.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n
Read Full Article At Source <\/a>The Runner debuts on Prime Video on September 2. If you\u2019re looking for 84 minutes (with credits!) of Gal Gadot running through the streets of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":81524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[29330,29329,28,489,12313],"class_list":["post-81523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-gadgets-reviews","tag-gadot","tag-gal","tag-review","tag-run","tag-runner","wpcat-32-id"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/81524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}