Runner is a 2026 action comedy directed by Scott Waugh, written by Miles Hubley and Tommy White, and released by Angel Studios in September. It runs 97 minutes and stars Alan Ritchson as Hank Malone, a former soldier working as a high-end courier, and Owen Wilson as Ben Bishop, the medical courier he must escort, with Rodrigo Santoro, Leila George, Sullivan Stapleton and Geraldine Hakewill in support. The premise is admirably simple: three hours to get a liver from Brisbane to the Gold Coast, with a cartel in pursuit.

First, a clarification that even professional critics have been forced to make. This is not The Runner, the Gal Gadot thriller I reviewed a few weeks ago and awarded a single point. Different film, nearly identical title, and this one is dramatically better. Roger Ebert's own review opens by making exactly this distinction, which tells you how confusing the situation has become.

This was significantly more fun than I expected, and the single best thing about it is the stunt work and the way it has been captured. The action is clean and legible. You can always tell where everybody is, what they are attempting, and whether it is working. That should be a baseline expectation and in practice it is increasingly rare.

So I went looking for an explanation afterwards, and it is a genuinely satisfying one. Scott Waugh is a former professional stuntman. Not a director who works well with stunt teams, an actual performer who rose high enough in that world to become president of Stunts Unlimited, the elite organisation in the field, and who then retired from performing at the age of thirty specifically in order to direct. He has also said that he travelled to Australia four weeks ahead of the rest of the production purely to work out the action sequences on location.

That explains everything about how this film is shot. The stunt crew, coordinated by Ryan Tarran, absolutely deserve the recognition, and I sincerely hope they receive it, because the person in charge came up through exactly that world and has plainly built the film around their work rather than treating it as something to be covered afterwards.

On the cast, Owen Wilson does very well at whatever it was he was asked to do, and I strongly suspect the instruction was simply to be Owen Wilson. He is, it must be said, exceptionally good at that, and his nervous, talkative energy is the perfect counterweight to his co-star.

Alan Ritchson, arriving off the back of Reacher, is genuinely impressive. His physical acting in particular is excellent. There is a sequence in which he hurls himself into a car that is already resting on its side and tips it fully over, and I believed every frame of it, because the man is roughly the dimensions of a water buffalo and appears to be constructed entirely out of muscle. Several critics noted that the film loses energy whenever he is off screen, and I would not argue with that.