The Runner Review – Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson’s thriller is fit for a B-movie

WITHedit where necessary: ​​Of the many, many variations of the boring late-summer action movie, very few have applied the gonzo B-movie treatment—physics-defying car chases, knee-breaking violence and the like—to the practice of organ transportation.

Delivering donors isn’t the direction you’d think things are going after first meeting Hank Malone, Alan Ritchson’s sort of impossibly muscular sidekick, in The Runner, religious distributor Angel Studios’ latest attempt to break into the market for simpler, basic entertainment.

Embodying the term “ex-military” in appearance and atmosphere (we get the early and ominous statement “I don’t hurt people anymore”), this “big American Wario” – so says his phone-only handler – seems better suited to high-stakes evacuations and special operations than life on a houseboat in Australia. There he practices French Duolingo between AA meetings and runs personal errands, including delivering exotic birds. But The Runner, directed by action veteran Scott Waugh (6 Below, Need for Speed) from a script by Miles Hubley and Tommy White (not to be confused with Gal Gadot’s comparatively dull film). “The Runner,” also released this month), has enough down-home humor and B-movie sensibility to veer toward camp.

And so a seemingly simple task – delivering a donor liver from a Brisbane airport to a little girl with cancer and her exhausted mother (Leila George) languishing in a Gold Coast children’s hospital – goes horribly, and dare I say pleasantly, awry. First, Liver comes accompanied by Owen Wilson, who plays Ben Bishop, a simple-minded, hat-wearing life-lover with an annoying tendency to refer to himself in the third person. On the other hand, there is a seemingly endless line of cartel hitmen who, like the infamous dog who ate the ill-fated heart in One Tree Hill, are inspiringly absurd, solely focused on the prized organ at hand, and largely mute.

One might ask, as Ben Bishop does, “What is a cartel doing in Queensland, Australia?!” There is little clarity, except that livers of the rare blood type appear to be selling on the black market for more than a million dollars. But no matter—The Runner soon offers ample reason, as well as the requisite B-movie pleasures: plenty of telenovela-worthy plot twists; Ritchson coolly delivers lines like “I’m the only one we can trust right now” while flexing his jaw; the constant increase in the size of weapons and hand-to-hand combat (why does the Colombian cartel rely on Australian biker gangs? Who knows!); an opportunity for non-Australian viewers to learn the approximate geography of the area between Brisbane and the Gold Coast; a Range Rover battle that’s fast-paced enough to keep one on the hook for a decent 98 minutes. And above all, there’s the deliciously sinister Rodrigo Santoro as the open wounded cartel boss known as Damian, so in touch with his molten core, for reasons that will be revealed, that he seems to be on the verge of tears in every shootout.

As a former stuntman, director Waugh knows how to handle action-packed action, turning the camera on a car chase or six-on-one battle with the panache of a sports star. There’s a dizzying video game logic to the brutal, anvil-heavy, shin-splitting Runner that both unites the film with its countless Netflix brethren and also sets it apart from them. That our perspective sometimes resembles a (glorious) death spiral is perhaps for the best, since there is little else to support it. While both play straight to type, the chemistry between Ritchson and Wilson is serviceable at best and (admittedly soapy) at worst distracting from the cartoonish antics. The attempts at big feelings to accompany big biceps (yes, big American Wario has a tragic backstory) carry an emotional weight that’s reminiscent of a swoosh. In the film’s meta-battle between the action camp and the sincerity camp, the former wins by a landslide – and yes, you get that needle, too – although I appreciate any movie that makes grown men cry.

I don’t want to value power over everything else, but given the shameful excess of straightforward background noise, it’s hard to root against a theatrical release that, consciously or not, packs some truly catastrophic punches with enough over-the-top silliness to make you smile. The fact that some heart was lost during transportation is quite normal in this case.