‘Runner’ Review: Alan Ritchson’s Cartoonish Bulk Powers a B-Movie Thriller That Only Comes Alive at Full Speed

Anyone driving for a delivery app should demand a hefty hourly pay increase if they’re asked to make deliveries like this one. Runner imagines the worst possible scenario for someone whose job is to bring packages to people’s doorsteps. Granted, the task facing Hank Malone (Alan «Reacher» Ritchson) isn’t exactly the same as delivering a pizza on a bicycle. He’s a runner, a muscular, highly trained former soldier whose job is to transport rather more sensitive and important cargo. And over the course of the film’s 98 minutes, he’s handed one particularly challenging assignment.

Not so much because of what he has to deliver, but because of the people who get involved along the way, all determined to get their hands on it. Hank must transport a donor liver to a little girl waiting in a hospital. He has a limited window to complete the delivery, since the organ will become unusable after a certain number of hours. And so this recovering alcoholic, now based in Australia and carrying, naturally, some heavy family trauma on his broad shoulders, takes on the job.

Scott Waugh (Need for Speed) is, like many good action directors, a former stuntman, someone who knows a thing or two about putting these kinds of sequences together. And that’s where the film’s real strength lies. Waugh attempts to pair Ritchson with Owen Wilson, hoping to create a somewhat comic double act that will give the story some verbal charm and a lighter tone. But it never quite works. Waugh clearly has more ideas when it comes to staging spectacular car chases than when it comes to having two people sit down and talk.

Wilson plays Ben Bishop, the man responsible for transporting the liver and keeping it inside a high-tech cooler that he barely lets out of his hands. What neither of them anticipates is that a violent, heavily armed gang will come after them, determined to steal the package, which apparently carries a multimillion-dollar price tag on the black market. Or perhaps they have other, more secretive reasons for wanting it? The gang is led by Damián (Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro), a supposedly Colombian mobster who has his sights firmly set on the cargo and will stop at nothing to get it.

That’s the premise driving Runner, a B-movie action thriller from Angel Studios, the faith-based production and distribution company known for films about religion, faith and family values, which has established itself in the industry thanks to hits such as Sound of Freedom (2023). Surprisingly violent for a supposedly «inspirational» story, and with nothing explicitly religious beyond the protagonists’ efforts and sacrifices to save a little girl’s life, Waugh’s film works best when it gets moving. In fact, by far its best sequence is a street chase, staged in just a handful of shots, that is genuinely impressive, even if one can easily imagine the amount of trickery and digital manipulation involved in post-production.

Beyond that, there’s not much to get excited about. The action sequences built around shootouts, armed confrontations and hand-to-hand combat are far more routine and considerably less inventive. What does work in those scenes is Ritchson himself. With his enormous, almost cartoonish physique, he makes it at least somewhat plausible that one man could take on a dozen or more opponents and come out standing. Along with the beautiful Australian landscapes, which are far less familiar on screen than the usual American urban backdrops, Ritchson is the special effect that keeps the film from completely running out of steam.