The Runner is a 2026 British action thriller directed by Kevin Macdonald, written by Mark Gibson, produced by Amazon MGM Studios and Rockwood Pictures, and released on Prime Video. It stars Gal Gadot as Maia Marten, a successful London attorney, Damian Lewis as the anonymous Caller, and Alfred Enoch in support, with Rory Wilmot as Maia's son Noah. The setup is straightforward: Noah is abducted during Maia's morning run, and the Caller instructs her to cross London on foot and murder her own star witness within the hour, or her son will be killed. Keep moving, follow every instruction, tell nobody.

I want to open with an honest account of my viewing experience. It took me half a day to finish this film. Not because of its length, which is unremarkable, but because I kept stopping. I found chores. I found errands. At one stage I seriously weighed up doing paperwork instead. When a ninety-odd minute thriller cannot hold you across a single sitting, something has gone fundamentally wrong.

Let me start with Damian Lewis, because he deserves better than this. He is a genuinely excellent actor with one of the great voices in the business, and lending both to this project is something he should feel a little ashamed about. In fairness, the role gives him almost nothing to work with. He is a voice on a telephone for essentially the entire film, and the Hollywood Reporter's review captured it perfectly, describing him as phoning it in, because that is the role. I would like it on record that a professional got to that joke before I did, and it was the correct call.

The film's central ambition is its final twist, and here is where my frustration genuinely lives, because the twist itself is not the problem. You can feel how hard the screenplay is working towards it. And it would have landed. It genuinely would have worked, if the film had not spent the preceding ninety minutes signposting every quiet, calculating decision Maia makes so heavily that the audience arrives at the destination long before the film does. A twist requires the audience to be looking elsewhere. This one waves at you from across the road for an hour and then acts surprised when you say hello.

Then there is the running, which the film approaches with total commitment and very little grace. There is an enormous amount of slow motion, and what that slow motion mostly captures is a series of deeply uncomfortable facial expressions, accompanied by a volume of heavy breathing that becomes genuinely oppressive over the runtime. It is not tense. It is exhausting in the wrong direction.