Gal Gadot thriller The Runner sprints to a dramatic conclusion – but does the ending stand up to scrutiny? Inevitable spoilers ahead. NB: This is your final warning for major plot spoilers for The Runner. “The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.” So said Robert McKee ... The Runner on Prime Video | Just how plausible are the logistics of that ending?
Gal Gadot thriller The Runner sprints to a dramatic conclusion – but does the ending stand up to scrutiny? Inevitable spoilers ahead.
NB: This is your final warning for major plot spoilers for The Runner.
“The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.”
So said Robert McKee in 2002’s Adaptation – or, at least, the fictional version of the author and screenwriting lecturer played with fiery enthusiasm by Brian Cox.
“You can have flaws and problems,” Mckee says.“But wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit. Find an ending. But don’t cheat, and don’t you dare bring in a deus ex machina.”
The Runner has an ending, alright – a third-act twist that leaves its villain staring in disbelief. But does it cheat?
Charging full-pelt onto Prime Video (albeit with relatively little promotion beyond an emailed press release), The Runner is a new thriller vehicle for the former Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot. Well, we call it a vehicle: the actor spends the majority of the film sprinting about on foot.
Directed by Kevin Macdonald (Touching The Void, The Last King Of Scotland), The Runner follows the progress of lawyer Maia Marten, a lawyer whose diabetic young son, Noah (Rory Wilmot), is kidnapped from his school one sunny morning.
Maia’s out on her morning jog across London when she receives a call from her son’s phone: a mysterious caller (Damian Lewis, in hushed villain mode) says he’s taken Noah hostage. Maia’s guided to a spot where she finds a pistol hidden in a bin; she’s then told that she has precisely one hour to hot-foot it to a hotel roughly six miles away. There, the key witness in a gangland murder trial sits under police protection.
Maia’s mission: to get into the room and kill the witness (Phoenix Di Sebastiani) before he can testify in court. If she doesn’t, her son, who’s now in a diabetic coma, will die. To make things even trickier, the villain’s tracking Maia’s every move – and wants to see her carry out the bloody deed over a live stream from her phone.
Much of The Runner takes place in real time, with Macdonald’s digital camera following an increasingly sweaty Gadot as she navigates the capital’s busy streets and underground tunnels.
Written by Mark Gibson, it’s another an earpiece thriller in the mode of 2024’s Carry-On, albeit mixed with the mobile phone-preoccupied antics of Cellular and the ticking-clock gimmick of Phone Booth (the latter two written by the late, great Larry Cohen).
It’s all conspicuously light on tension for the most part, with a plot too fixated on chaos and movement to focus on building interesting characters, but also too reliant on care-worn thriller plot devices to keep us on the edge of our seats. In this regard, the villain’s constant refrain of “You’re boring me!” makes him feel like a stand-in for the audience at home. (A timer will occasionally appear on the screen to remind us of how much time has elapsed – for this writer, Maia always seemed to have more time left than I’d hoped.)
With a brisk duration of just 85 minutes (including credits), though, The Runner sprints to the third-act reveal that its makers hope will wow us in the end.
Seconds after she’s busted into the Excelsior hotel room and blasted the star witness with the villain’s pistol, Maia is reunited with her son, who has thankfully survived the ordeal. But eagle-eyed viewers may notice that the police are remarkably friendly towards Maia, given that she’s just murdered an innocent man in cold blood.
But! It turns out that, as she was huffing and pufffing her way across London, Maia was cooking up a plan. A series of flashbacks reveal that she managed to get out a couple of messages to her police force love interest, Ted McBain (Alfred Enoch).
The first was on a tube train, where she secreted a stolen phone on a passenger. It contained the message:
Call Ted McBain at Star Chambers.
LANDLINE ONLY
They will kill Noah if I don’t shoot Tafa!!!!
Maia
Luckily for Maia, the passenger took the time to make the call, thus giving the authorities the first tip-off about our heroine’s predicament. At this point, the protagonist has about 35 minutes left to get to the hotel.
Later, Maia left a second message in a pub – this one scrawled with red lipstick on a pane of glass.
It’s here that Maia sketched out the brief outline of a plan: rig up the star witness with bullet squibs. Provide blanks for the pistol she’s holding. Then they can fake the witness’s execution and fool the villain:
HELP! 0207 946 7744 – Ted McBain
Use blanks and blood bags
No mobile phones. No police radios
Ruger LCP
Maia
Again, Maia’s fortunate that a guy in the pub – presumably the one we see reading the message – rang the number and gave McBain all this information. (We tried the number ourselves – it doesn’t work. Shame, as we have so many questions.)
It’s worth pausing here to note just how little time McBain and his colleagues would have had to enact Maia’s plan.
As the villain himself says right around the time Maia wrote the lipstick note, she had 15 minutes left to get to the hotel.
By extension, McBain and the cops had less than 15 minutes to:
-Find a magazine of blank bullets that matched Maia’s gun – an American firearm that isn’t exactly common in the UK
-Locate an effects specialist who knows about squibs and how to safely rig them up
-Rig up the witness with the squibs, complete with detonator
All of this would have had to have happened well before Maia arrived in the room; had she stumbled in while her conspirators were still tidying away their makeup bags and other paraphernalia, the wheeze would have been blown.
Note how the hotel’s proprietors are also involved in the scheme: one of the workers is seen holding signs for Maia to read, telling her where the clip of blank bullets is hidden (it’s in lift three, though it doesn’t say where; Maia manages to locate it behind a rail without missing a beat).
We were a bit skeptical about the time it might take to rig someone up with fake bullet hits, to say the least. But the video below, made by a company called Air Squib, suggests that a single blood bag can be slapped on a performer’s chest within a few seconds, so maybe this bit isn’t too far-fetched.
All the same, orchestrating what amounts to a complex practical effects sequence in less than 15 minutes sounds like a remarkably tall order. In order to look convincing, it would have required a perfect synchronisation between Maia’s pulls of the trigger and the detonation of the bullet hits. It relied on the star witness being a decent actor, and being able to process the news that he’d have to fake his own death with only a few minutes’ notice.
The film also suggests that the squibs were applied to the witness not by some specialist, but by a cop and a paramedic:
Thrillers often stretch the bounds of credulity, but The Runner, we’d argue, pulls them beyond breaking point. But it does so in a way that is almost admirable; the rest of the film is largely forgettable, but we’ll be thinking about the final act’s sheer madness for quite a while.
The film’s most memorable image, we’d argue, is simply Damian Lewis’s face, standing in front of Gal Gadot and struggling to process the enormity of what’s just happened. He doesn’t say anything; he simply stands there, staring in disbelief. Once again, Lewis is the stand-in for the audience at home, sitting baffled on their sofas.
Does The Runner’s ending cheat? That’s up for debate. Did it wow us in the end? In a funny sort of way, it did.
