Born to middle-class parents, Gal Gadot parlayed success in beauty pageants into military service as a combat fitness instructor. Then came a modeling career and, eventually, Hollywood stardom. Yet, because she is Israeli, Gadot’s mere existence seems to invite a political tribunal before the opening credits of any movie she stars in.
Her latest film, The Runner, a serviceable direct-to-streaming suspense thriller from director Kevin Macdonald, has been greeted with striking hostility. The A.V. Club’s critic, for example, derides her delivery as “inhuman” and spends much of the review mocking the actress herself.
The performance is anything but. Gadot plays Maia Marten, a successful criminal lawyer and single mother who has taken up running. Gadot effectively projects the calm, controlled confidence commensurate with an experienced attorney. Those qualities become indispensable when, during a routine morning run after dropping her son at school, a mysterious phone call upends her carefully ordered life.
The caller has kidnapped her diabetic son, Noah, and wants Maia to kill the key witness in a murder case against his criminal employer. She has one hour to run roughly five miles across London to the hotel where the witness is being held. Stop moving, alert the police, or disobey an instruction, and Noah dies.
Here lies the film’s most compelling idea. Maia has built her career upon the rule of law; now the safety of her child depends upon destroying it. Plenty of action films, from Taken to Man on Fire, turn men already accustomed to violence into vigilantes in pursuit of a greater good. The Runner instead places this unfathomable moral quandary in the hands of a lawyer whose profession depends upon the very institutions she is being forced to circumvent. Maia is left with an impossible question. What would a mother do when every institution capable of protecting her child has been rendered impotent?
Macdonald’s best idea is to place this ordeal inside the dense, dizzying sprawl of modern phone dependence. His camera sweeps through London streets crowded with people staring into screens, remarkably unaware of (or indifferent to) their surroundings. This is the jungle Maia must navigate while her captor appears to have colonized her own device. He monitors her location, accesses her accounts and photographs, and even taunts her with AI-generated messages in Noah’s voice asking, “Can he be my daddy?” When Maia offers to “double whatever they are paying you,” he chuckles, “I’ve seen your bank balance. You can’t afford me.”
If there is one practical lesson from the ordeal, it is never to tell a flustered Gal Gadot to calm down. Maia tears through parks, streets, and the subway with Tom Cruise-like determination, improvising increasingly subtle ways to evade a captor who seems capable of seeing everything. At one point, she begins snatching strangers’ phones — cellphone robbery now a common London custom — in an attempt to recruit help without technically asking for it.
The premise plays like a mesh of 2002’s Phone Booth and Jason Statham’s Crank. We have an anonymous psychopath on the phone, a hero who cannot stop moving, and an increasingly ridiculous series of tasks. Yet Macdonald keeps the contraption moving, and the gambits Maia quietly plants along the way coalesce in a highly satisfying third act, like an endgame whose seemingly stray moves suddenly reveal their purpose.
The Runner is ultimately a one-woman show, and Gadot carries it through sheer physical commitment and screen presence. Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” repeatedly drifting through the caller’s end of the phone, becomes both a breadcrumb in Maia’s pursuit of him and an appropriately jaunty counterpoint to her panic.
NEWSOM’S SOUTH CAROLINA TRIP DOUBLES AS TEST OF DEMOCRATS’ REBUILDING STRATEGY
Gadot does not have the same range as a Meryl Streep or Kate Winslet (few actors do), but in the right role her talents palpably shine. She belongs in the company of performers such as Alan Ritchson and Sylvester Stallone, whose screen presence depends less on protean versatility than on physical authority and conviction — though, unlike both, Gadot has actually served in the Israeli army.
Patty Jenkins’s 2017 Wonder Woman was one such role. Maia Marten is another. And beneath the frenzied running and thriller contrivances, The Runner works because Gadot makes Maia’s defining conviction entirely credible. When every lawful avenue is deliberately closed to her, a mother will run through anything to reach her child.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.