Runner is one of those movies where you immediately wonder if such a position actually exists in the real world. I mean, you’d think maybe so, but it’s like a super-temp courier job where you speak directly with a dispatcher only through the phone, and then you go and deliver a package, talk to a client, help them unclog a drain—whatever it is.
It seems super unlikely, but what the heck? It’s a fun movie, so you go with it. They carry it off well enough that I will let that question go.
Runner stars Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson. It’s sort of a buddy comedy, but not really. They learn from one another. They interact with one another. There are some tears to be shed. It doesn’t feel entirely manipulative, but that brings me to another aspect of this movie.
If this movie had been made in, say, 1980, it would be fun. It would be explosive, and there would not be any backstory to speak of.
Look at the Dirty Harry movies. We do not care about Dirty Harry’s kids or wife or anything else like that. He simply says punks are bad. I’m going to make all punks pay for their being punks. You know his motivations. You don’t care whether his wife left him.
Runner cares a lot about Hank’s backstory.
Alan Ritchson plays Hank Malone, a former alcoholic and former Navy SEAL. He’s an American operating in Australia, and the reason he’s in Australia is because his ex-wife is Australian.
Okay, fine. Lots of backstory. You get to know his motivations. You get to know all this squishy emotional whatever that makes him tick.
Oh, and let’s not forget: he has basically sworn off violence, of course.
That all being said, it’s a very fun movie.
The action sequences are well-made and, on some occasions, entirely funny, if not exactly obeying the laws of physics. There is a scene in which another car takes off the front of Hank’s car. It peels it off like a hinge. I am fairly certain that the sort of force required to do that would cause such massive injuries that no one would survive, but in this case it’s just kind of funny.
A lot of wit is employed, and Ritchson carries off the role very well.
Owen Wilson plays Ben Bishop. He’s not quite the emotional heart of the movie, but he is the chatterbox who at first annoys and then charms Hank.
Ben is accompanying a donor liver that needs to be delivered from an airport to Gold Coast Children’s Hospital. Hank gets his marching orders from his handler, Iggy, whom we never really see except for one slightly tragic moment. Along the way, Hank has some interesting interactions with a very wealthy ex-couple and a fancy parakeet.
He also meets with his ex-wife, her current husband and their new baby. There is an element of tragedy in the backstory regarding that relationship. It’s all explained fairly well.
I just find it somewhat unnecessary.
This is an action flick and a minor buddy comedy. I don’t care about the backstory, just like I didn’t care when Riggs’s backstory started causing him PTSD in Lethal Weapon. It was good without it, but whatever. People demanded more depth to characters, and I guess this is the answer to it.
There is one factual issue that I have problems with: the organ in question is a liver.
Although I am not a medical doctor, I know that livers are pretty famous because they regenerate, and you only need a lobe or section of a liver for transplantation. So if this liver really is from a blood type this rare, my immediate thought was: why not split it and give part to each recipient?
Now, whether that would actually work with this particular liver and these particular patients is another question entirely. And, of course, one side of this little disagreement is a criminal organization and the other is the legitimate recipient. They’re not exactly going to sit down together and successfully negotiate a liver-sharing agreement.
So we’re going to have to let that go.
The legitimate recipient is a little girl, Ellie Baker, played by Scarlett Crabtree, and she is adorable. I think Crabtree did what she could with the part. They wrote her a little too childish for me, honestly, but she was used as a spice, not a main dish, so it went down fine.
Her mother, Kate, played by Leila George, is absolutely, absolutely great.
She plays the part of a desperate mother perfectly, including the well-expressed version of a mother doing anything to protect what she needs to protect without suddenly becoming Superwoman. She uses her wits. She tries to use her strength. It’s not going to work every time, but she thinks through the problem and accomplishes her goal.
The main antagonist is Damián Zaldívar, played by Rodrigo Santoro, and he is a perfectly menacing bad guy. They throw in backstory for him that makes him really pathetic. You know, he’s a mama’s boy. His mama is stronger than he is, and Hank manages to turn that around toward the end to good effect.
So, like I said, they add a lot of backstory, but they make use of it. It’s not just backstory for backstory’s sake.
And despite my complaints about how much emotional baggage this action movie has to haul along with it, it isn’t overwritten. I enjoyed Runner quite a lot.
My final thought is that this movie is not going to pull its punches. Not everyone is going to survive.
There’s no sequel being built in simply by making sure all the main stars are still alive at the end, and I find that quite refreshing. Sad for the actors, of course, but it gives me hope that this movie is just going to be allowed to stand on its own, without somebody immediately clamoring for a sequel or retaining the IP so that 15 years from now we can all look forward to Runner 17.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★