Damianista’s note: This review discusses the film’s basic setup and a few scenes beyond those shown in the trailer, but contains no major spoilers.
Let me begin with the obvious: The Runner is not the movie of the year.
It is one of those kidnapping thrillers in which an ordinary person receives a terrifying phone call and must follow a criminal’s instructions to save someone they love. We have seen plenty of them, haven’t we?
However, one thing distinguishes it from many similar thrillers: the person doing the running, fighting and quick problem-solving is a woman. In this kind of story, the desperate parent and action hero has often been a man. Here Maia is given the same freedom male action heroes have long enjoyed—to be physically strong, think strategically and be the one responsible for saving the day. This may not reinvent the formula, but it does help level the playing field for female characters.
This does not mean that The Runner is an excellent movie. No, it is not, and I have reservations that I will discuss later. But it is a good choice for action-thriller lovers. It moves quickly, it has its moments, and the psychological duel at its center keeps it engaging. And this is coming from someone who almost never watches mainstream commercial films, particularly action movies.
If you are watching only because you want to see a lot of Damian Lewis, however, you should adjust your expectations. You will get plenty of his voice, along with shadows, blurred images and tiny glimpses of him. We see him in the flesh only briefly. This is very much a Gal Gadot movie.
London wakes to people walking through its streets, talking on their phones about run-of-the-mill problems: a broken printer, a manager watching an employee through a camera and all the minor frustrations of an ordinary morning in a busy metropolis.
In the London home Maia shares with her son Noah, the problem is football. Noah hates it and does not want to go to school. We also learn that he has diabetes and needs to check his glucose during the day. Maia has an important morning in court, but first she drops him at school and begins her daily run.
Maia is a competitive runner. In the park, she races a random man and, naturally, beats him. She takes calls from a colleague and a client without breaking her stride. During one conversation, she offers a piece of wisdom that becomes the heart of the film:
“Ninety-nine percent of defending yourself is telling the right story. Controlling the narrative.”
That is not only how Maia works as a lawyer; it is also how she will try to defend herself and her son over the next hour.
Then Noah calls. Maia stops for him—and hears a stranger’s voice. The mysterious Caller claims to have her son and soon proves that this is no prank.
The Caller has given Noah an extra dose of insulin, inducing a coma. He tells Maia that the condition can be reversed with the glucagon she always carries. But first she must cross London within an hour and kill the star witness due to testify against his employer. She cannot stop, ask for help or speak to anyone but the Caller.
Maia tries to reason with him. If he is one of the defendant’s men, perhaps he can testify in exchange for immunity. But it turns out the Caller is a freelancer hired to keep Boyd out of prison—which appears to be exactly where Boyd belongs after the deaths of two innocent young women. And if Maia fails, the Caller has a bomb as his backup plan. Many people could die, not only Noah.
That is all the plot you need to know.
At the heart of The Runner is the psychological game between Maia and the Caller: a duel, if you will, between the runner and the man in her ear. In my opinion, this is the strongest part of the film.
There is plenty of action and, of course, a great deal of running. At the same time, Maia makes decisions in the blink of an eye that will have consequences later. She follows her own motto about controlling the narrative, trying to remain one step ahead of the Caller even while she appears to obey him.
The Caller has done his homework meticulously. The screen in front of him is filled with photographs, files and stories from Maia’s past, while another screen tracks her across London. He knows her daily habits, the ramen she orders every week, her history as a pentathlon champion and the fact that her father trained her. He knows that Noah was conceived using donor sperm. He has even constructed his own psychological explanation for that decision, connecting it to events from Maia’s childhood that are revealed slowly throughout the film.
He mocks Maia for presenting herself as a fearless champion of wronged women and suggests that this identity also comes from her past. Because he knows her history, he believes he knows exactly what she will do. He is certain that information equals control.
But Maia is a lawyer. Controlling the narrative is what she does. If you have a lawyer in your family, you know how they are. Well, my mom is a retired lawyer 🙂
The Caller is a complete narcissist and psychopath. He can seem almost affectionate toward Noah, then calmly trap a mosquito under a glass and stab it—a rather obvious metaphor for what he believes he has done to Maia. His confidence makes him frightening, but it is also his greatest vulnerability. We know what usually happens to villains who become convinced they cannot possibly lose.
The Runner touches on our dependence on phones, how much personal information is collected about us, constant surveillance and the use of AI to imitate and manipulate people. It does not explore these subjects deeply, but they are always in the background. People stare at their screens, barely noticing the desperate woman racing past them.
This feels uncomfortably close to stories we now see in the news. Scammers use AI voice-cloning tools and short audio clips from social media, videos or voicemails to imitate loved ones. They call claiming that the person has been injured, arrested or kidnapped, creating enough panic and urgency to make their target reveal private information or send money before checking the story. The Federal Trade Commission warns that even a short audio clip posted online may be enough to copy someone’s voice.
The details in The Runner are different, but the psychological weapon is much the same. The Caller isolates Maia, frightens her and denies her the time to think or verify anything independently. Technology gives him access, but fear gives him control. He is not merely hacking Maia’s phone; he is trying to hack Maia herself.
Director Kevin Macdonald explained that many scenes were filmed on live London streets without closing them. Some startled faces belong to people suddenly realizing Gal Gadot has run past; others are too absorbed in their phones to notice.
Filming this way was hardly easy, but Macdonald’s documentary background must have helped him work with the unpredictability of live streets. He allows London’s crowds and their unplanned reactions to become part of the story. And if you haven’t seen the brilliant Touching the Void, you are missing something special!
London is not merely the setting in The Runner. It is one of the main characters. Maia’s journey takes us past the beautiful central London skyline, Somerset House, Kentish Town, King’s Cross, St Paul’s Cathedral, London Bridge and more. Even when the story feels familiar, London gives us something wonderful to look at.
Macdonald and his team also respect the city’s geography. Maia follows a route that could actually take her from north London toward the river rather than magically jumping between unrelated locations. That makes the journey more convincing, even when some of Maia’s physical feats are not.
As for my reservations, the bridge jump shown in the trailer is a stretch, as is taking a shortcut on foot and somehow catching the same Tube train at the next station. I understand that a mother whose child has been kidnapped might discover unexpected strength, but these moments ask too much of me.
This has nothing to do with Maia being a woman. I would not believe a man could do these things either. I simply do not believe in Wonder Men or Wonder Women performing impossible physical feats—unless they happen to be Usain Bolt. That is my main problem with action films.
Of course, Gal Gadot is Wonder Woman, and Macdonald has said that the contrast appealed to him: taking someone audiences see as a larger-than-life comic-book figure and placing her in the middle of a very real London. But there were moments when Maia’s inner Wonder Woman emerged a little too strongly for the supposedly grounded world around her.
Still, Gal Gadot gives everything to the movie’s physical demands. She runs, jumps, fights, bleeds and carries on. As you watch her, and maybe also because it is a Gal Gadot movie, you know that Maia will find some way to try to set the world right again. The real question is how—and whether the film can make us believe it.
Before the film arrived, we spent a great deal of time unpacking the trailer. While some fans hoped Damian might be Maia’s bodyguard, I championed the villain theory. For once, I was right!
Some fans dislike seeing their favorite actor play the bad guy. I am not one of them. I love seeing Damian in different kinds of roles, and he is particularly good at revealing the human being inside deeply flawed characters without asking us to forgive what they do.
The trailer hid him in shadows, but that voice was too familiar not to notice. The finished film does much the same. Damian performs mainly with his voice, delivering his instructions with quiet, chilling control. The Caller sits among his screens, watching Maia struggle and believing he has anticipated her every move. He never needs to shout, which only makes him creepier.
That is exactly why Macdonald wanted him. The director joked that Damian is his London neighbor and that casting him kept things local, but the serious reason was Damian’s ability to suggest danger without pushing too hard:
“He never overplays. And I think in a movie like this, if we’d gone melodramatic, the whole movie would have fallen apart.”
The trailer made us wonder whether something personal connected him to Maia. “I have forgotten nothing” sounded like the words of someone who remembered her, not simply someone who had researched her. His brief “Maia?” almost seemed worried, while his behavior toward Noah appeared strangely gentle. Damian also warned us that “inevitably, everything is not what it seems.” Naturally, it made me overthink.
The film eventually provides its own answers. I will not reveal them, but some of the clues that intrigued us in the trailer are given less weight in the finished story than I expected.
That brings me to Damian’s disguise.
During filming, we saw photographs of Damian outside Noah’s school in a trench coat, gloves, wig and fake mustache. In the film, a stranger “accidentally” bumps into Maia and Noah, but we see little more than a gloved hand and the man walking away. We recognize Damian largely because of those set photographs.
The encounter is never explained. The Caller’s surveillance and hacking clearly required preparation long before that morning, so I don’t think the collision hacked Maia’s phone. Perhaps it completed some final part of his plan or simply showed that he had been physically close to them. Either way, the fuller disguise scenes appear to have been cut.
I confess that I am disappointed. Damian looked wonderfully sinister in that costume, and I would have liked to see more than his glove and the back of his head. I would love to know why Macdonald removed those scenes.
But then the film gives Damian fans its best surprise!
While Maia runs through a park in panic, she studies the people around her, searching for the Caller. The camera examines several strangers—and there, at exactly 17:42, are Damian and Petra, walking together as themselves!
I loved that Easter egg so much. ❤️
The film may have taken away most of Damian’s mustache-and-trench-coat appearance, but it gave us Damian and Petra casually enjoying the park in the middle of Maia’s nightmare.
I will not reveal what happens, I find the ending abrupt and underwhelming. After all the running, surveillance and psychological manipulation, almost everything is resolved in about three minutes. That is especially disappointing because the film has spent so much time building the psychological duel between Maia and the Caller. Such a battle deserves a more tense and satisfying final move.
The Caller should also be smarter. He is clearly no rookie: he has researched Maia meticulously and spends most of the film several steps ahead of her. I understand that his overconfidence must become a weakness, but such an experienced and careful criminal needed a more convincing final act.
That is not something the cast can fix. Gal Gadot and Damian Lewis can do their best with the material they have been given, but they cannot create tension that is not in the script.
Overall, The Runner is short, fast and easy to watch. London looks wonderful, Gal Gadot commits fully to an exhausting role, and Damian makes the Caller as sinister as the script allows. I only wish we had seen more of him rather than hearing so much of him through a phone. The soundtrack also works very well, with Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” a particular highlight.
So, if you want an undemanding 84-minute thriller, a high-speed tour of London and Damian Lewis being extremely sinister in your ear, The Runner is a good watch.
The Runner is now streaming on Prime Video.
Loved it, and quite frankly I didn’t expect to since it seemed rather obvious we would not “see” much of Damian. I agree with you on the unbelievability of anyone completing that kind of a run, and am also no fan of action movies, yet every minute kept my interest. It was lacking character development of Damian’s role, but as always, he was completely convincing with his voice and the few glimpses we got. Without giving anything away, I have to say the ending was a complete shock !
Connie
So happy to hear from you, Connie! I hope all is well with you. Yeah I have a complicated relationship with action movies. But I think the reviews (at least the ones I’ve seen) are unnecessarily harsh. This is a decent film. And you’re right, it keeps your interest, I especially liked the psychological duel between the runner and the caller. No character development, but neither actor could do anything about it, that’s the cript, and most action thrillers are plot driven after all. I found the ending quite rushed and underwhelming. I agree Damian gives his 100% and is very convincing and sinister as the caller.
L’ho visto oggi e mi ha molto delusa. Trovo che sia da stolti non approfondire un po’ di più le storie e non spiegare niente. Non è mistero, è pochezza! Come si fa ad avere un attore come Damian Lewis e non “usarlo” fisicamente? Bisogna essere pazzi! L’ho guardato con in lingua originale con i sottotitoli sennò avrei sentito la voce dei doppiatori italiani… Ma dai! Non si può fare uno scempio così! Ho capito che si doveva enfatizzare l’attrice, ma questo regista e lo sceneggiatore dovrebbero essere puniti per aver fatto così poco sul suo antagonista. È un film monco. Potrebbe essere la pubblicità delle scarpe da corsa… Comunque, delinquente o santo, io amo Damian Lewis!❤️