The Runner has many hallmarks of the ideal straight-to-streaming thriller. It’s short, punchy, a little bit silly, and the theoretically-perfect combination of unpretentious – it’s about a woman forced to run across London and commit a murder in order to save her kidnapped son – and ambitious, as a movie that unfolds in something resembling real time. It also features what so many streaming movies like to boast about: a big-name star. And that, as it happens, is the movie’s unexpected undoing. It simply cannot fully survive the mixed blessing that is international movie star Gal Gadot.
Plenty of people would describe Gadot as a laughably terrible actress, and maybe laugh some more at her designation as an international movie star, at that. (It’s literally true; she was born in Israel, worked in some Israeli TV series, and relocated to Los Angeles for her movie career.) But despite some sketchy politics that have lost her some fans, it’s hard to deny Gadot’s star status, if only through sheer visibility: Almost every movie she’s ever appeared in has been a mainstream wide release, and she’s been front and center for large chunks of the DCEU and Fast & Furious franchises. Her movie Red Notice, in which she co-stars with Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds, remains one of the biggest in Netflix history.
Movies like Red Notice and its ilk have created the not-unfair impression that Gadot’s range as a performer is model-thin – appropriate, given her past as the winner of the Miss Israel pageant. But she lucked into a perfect role for her whole deal with Wonder Woman, who she played in half a dozen superhero films between 2016 and 2023 (two Wonder Woman films, two ensemble pieces, and two cameos in other heroes’ movies). It’s fashionable now to dismiss the original Wonder Woman’s success as the product of both pent-up demand – at the time, Wonder Woman was the world’s most famous superhero to never appear in her own film – and a rush of first-term-Trump solidarity from feminism-friendly audiences, and little to do with Gadot’s shoddy acting.
This is revisionism, and inaccurate: Gadot is weirdly perfect as Wonder Woman, in the first film as well as its less beloved sequel. The otherworldly quality of Diana, essentially a demigod who exists out of time and, at least at first, outside of normal society, on the magically insulated island of Themyscira, makes the occasional stiltedness of Gadot’s delivery seem natural, and her lack of deep-dive acting roles (she had fewer than 10 movie roles under her belt when she shot Batman v. Superman) was a good fit for the first movie’s fish-out-of-water material.
Those are more circumstantial qualities that happened to align the actress with her most famous role, but Gadot also, especially in the Patty Jenkins-directed Wonder Woman solo films, has a sweet earnestness that recalls Christopher Reeve’s work in the original Superman series. Also like Reeve, Gadot generates genuine chemistry with her non-super-powered love interest (Chris Pine). She’s not a superhero in the Marvel mode, a relatable figure wisecracking their way through a fantastical story. She’s a superhero in the DC mode of a living god, and to her credit, she made that tricky-to-play character type enormously winning. Her more-statuesque-than-life bearing also served her well in the comic spy caper Keeping Up with the Joneses and the elegantly silly murder mystery Death on the Nile.
On the other side, all of those qualities make her a profoundly ill fit for a movie like The Runner, which is supposed to (at least partially) depend on the grounded spectacle of a regular-seeming person thrust into a crazy, heightened thriller situation. These kinds of arrangements often involve suspension of disbelief; actors as variously towering, imposing, and/or charismatic as Cary Grant, Liam Neeson, Rachel McAdams, and Halle Berry have all played the everyman conscripted into a preposterous Hitchcock-style plot. What’s more, The Runner is one of those movies like Phone Booth or Locke, where the star is essentially soloing for much of the movie, with the villain’s presence largely voice-only.
This gives Gadot no one to really play off of – and moreover, she does not, it must be said, seem to have it within her to even temporarily fake any of the things she’s supposed to be here: a brilliant lawyer, a fiercely protective mother, and a steely abuse survivor. Saying Gadot isn’t convincing in those capacities might sound insulting, not least because she is, in fact, a mother, and may be a fiercely protective one at that. (She certainly has the training for it as a former member of the IDF.) She probably has other experiences she could draw upon to fulfill those other aspects of her character, too. It’s just that as an actor, her toolkit is relatively limited, and The Runner feels almost perversely designed to emphasize everything she’s bad at: Sounding casual, conveying angry intensity, showing fear and panic. She can, at least, run convincingly.
The movie, shot by sometime Danny Boyle collaborator Anthony Dod Mantle and directed by sometime Danny Boyle impersonator Kevin Macdonald, takes advantage of that headlong momentum, and keeps a tight pace (it’s 84 minutes with credits, meaning it’s really under 80 when everything wraps up). Presumably a lot of people will watch it – and it’s hard to picture many of them coming away impressed by Gadot’s work. In fact, The Runner makes it hard to picture what exactly Gadot might do next, now that her crack at Wonder Woman is definitively over.
It might make sense for her to shift over to a related but slightly different form of Liam Neeson-style vehicle. Neeson has done the Hitchcockian-web thing before, in Jaume Collet-Serra’s Unknown and The Commuter, both much better thrillers than The Runner. But he’s also been sort of a nouveau-Eastwood figure in movies like Memory or The Marksman. (He was also very funny spoofing his own imposing image in The Naked Gun. Just saying.) Gadot might also work in a romantic comedy – not the soft-hearted, ultra-synthetic kind that does well on streaming these days, but something more akin to a ’60s caper. (Maybe I’m saying “Red Notice, but make it good.”) Anything that allows her to be playful or deadpan, rather than serious or, worse, seriously relatable.
Honestly, there are plenty of other performers who would benefit from following that advice. One of the worst crutches in the management of an actress’s career is the tendency to turn them into avenging-mother figures who will stop at nothing to get back their child. It’s supposed to be a reminder of the woman’s humanity; it comes across as a kind of aggressive marketing, angrily assuring the audience that of course this movie star is human; she’s pretending to get mad about a child. But that kind of righteousness isn’t a fit for everyone, and Gadot doesn’t have the kind of range to make it work for her. No shame in that; not every actor needs boundless range. The trick is to figure out which moves work, and which ones leave a recognizable star running in circles.
The Runner is now streaming on Prime Video.
Stream The Runner on Prime Video
