Brent Marchant

Pulse-pounding deadline-based thrillers have become a common source of action-adventure viewing over the years. These largely formulaic offerings are often fairly predictable, with their outcomes frequently obvious well in advance, the only variable generally being the routes their narratives take to arrive at their final destinations. So it is again with this latest effort from director Kevin MacDonald, a typically capable filmmaker who comes up woefully short with this release. When London-based criminal attorney Maia Marten (Gal Godot) goes on her usual morning run before her latest big court case, she’s interrupted in mid-sprint by a cell phone call supposedly from her young son, Noah (Rory Wilmot). However, when she answers, she discovers it’s not from him but, instead, from an anonymous mystery caller (Damian Lewis) who has kidnapped Noah and threatens to kill him unless she follows his instructions to the letter. Specifically, the kidnapper wants Maia to murder a key witness in the case against his former employer, a high-profile mobster accused of killing two young women. But, to ensure that she complies with his directives, the caller says he’s tracking her movements by tapping into the geolocator on her cell phone. This requires her to remain out in the open, on the street, a plan that calls for the former champion pentathlete to run five miles across London in an hour to the hotel where the witness is in protective custody prior to his transfer to the courthouse. This setup thus launches the protagonist into her trek across the city, a journey filled with twists, turns, thrills, spills and the revelation of a variety of highly personal details, including long-held secrets. But is she up to this task? (You get three guesses.) As this scenario unfolds, though, the story is peppered with an array of credibility-stretching implausibilities that not even Wonder Woman herself is realistically capable of pulling off. Indeed, while tales like this typically call for viewers to suspend belief, many of the developments in this plot hole-ridden story are just plain difficult to accept. Admittedly, the narrative is stylishly dressed up in a superbly edited, fast-paced package with some inventive cinematography that shows off street-level London exquisitely, but such window dressing still can’t conceal the plethoric flaws in the script. With better writing and plot scrutiny, “The Runner” might have made for some late summer escapist fun, but it’s hard to fathom it as being much more than a paycheck for the principals involved and yet another in an ongoing string of substandard outings for Amazon Studios.