Courtesy of Angel Studios
Modern action movies have no shortage of firepower, but the good ones know excitement doesn’t come only from guns, bullets, and a steadily rising body count. Well-staged action, a story that actually builds tension, and characters worth rooting for can make even a familiar plot feel new. Runner has two leads who work well together, but then fails them at nearly every turn. Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson have great chemistry, but director Scott Waugh delivers muddy spectacle, cheap emotion, and very little reason to care who reaches the finish line.
Ritchson plays Hank Malone, a former soldier turned courier who takes a job transporting an organ needed to save a young girl’s life. Joining him is Ben Bishop (Wilson), the medical courier responsible for the precious cargo. They’ve got very little time to reach the hospital, but a ruthless cartel wants the organ for its own purposes. Soon, the delivery turns into a series of attacks, escapes, and a constant scramble to keep moving forward.
This setup should be suspenseful on its own: there’s a deadline, a vulnerable patient, and something fragile that has to survive a dangerous journey. But Waugh struggles to make those elements work together. The danger escalates, but the tension doesn’t. Instead of building on each obstacle, the movie just keeps throwing problems in the way and waits for the chaos to pass. Each narrow escape should ramp things up, but here it mostly just extends the chase.
The action doesn’t help much. Choppy editing ruins the movie’s flow, while shaky CGI hurts most of the major sequences. Effects that should make the danger feel real just remind you how fake everything looks. On top of that, there’s way too much CGI blood, which adds digital splatter but doesn’t make any of the violence feel real. Ritchson looks convincing in a fight, but the way the movie is made keeps the audience at a distance. There’s a lot of destruction, but not much excitement.
The movie’s only real saving grace is the chemistry between the two leads. Ritchson’s weary seriousness gives Wilson’s relaxed, talkative charm something solid to bounce off, and Wilson knows how to needle his costar without turning every exchange into a comedy bit. There’s a natural ease between them that the rest of the movie badly lacks. Their growing rapport provides occasional laughs and a little warmth. Watching them figure each other out is consistently more interesting than any of the action scenes.
Sadly, their chemistry also shows how little the screenplay gives them to work with. They find small moments in their scenes together, but they can’t turn every tired line into a good joke or make every emotional moment feel natural. Hank’s grief and recovery exist only to suggest depth, not to flesh out a real character. The supporting cast also offers little support. As the cartel’s leader, Rodrigo Santoro plays a one-note villain and plays that note at full volume, going so far over the top that his attempts at menace are laughable. As the sick girl’s mother, Leila George delivers a grating, over-the-top performance, acting at nearly the same level of distress in almost every scene. Neither actor finds much beyond the most obvious way to play their roles.
The movie’s weakest part is easily the storyline involving the sick kid, which should be the movie’s emotional center. Instead, the hospital scenes drag an already uneven movie to a crawl. The young actress’s performance is so stiff that her lines sound completely rehearsed, making moments that should be touching feel painfully awkward. Once again, the script doesn’t help, leaning on the seriousness of the illness instead of giving the girl a personality apart from her condition. Between the strained acting and the constant reminders of what’s at stake, these scenes try so hard for tears, but they leave little room for a genuine emotional reaction.
By the end, the movie relies only on escalation: more danger, more destruction, more insistence that this all means something. But bigger action can’t fix how poorly it’s staged, and emotion can’t save such flimsy storytelling. Ritchson and Wilson are the only reason the movie gets even half a star, bringing the only real spark in an otherwise exhausting movie. Their pairing makes individual moments watchable, which just makes the rest of the mess more frustrating. They deserve another movie together, preferably one with a more inspired story. Runner hands them precious cargo to deliver, but the heaviest thing they’re carrying is the movie itself.
Runner is currently playing in wide release.