Credit where credit is due: of the many, many variations on the hammy late-summer action romp, very few have applied the gonzo B-movie treatment – physics-defying car chases, knee-smashing violence and the like – to the practice of organ transportation.
Donor delivery is not the direction you think things are going in upon first meeting Hank Malone, Alan Ritchson’s outlandishly muscled fixer, of sorts, in Runner, the latest attempt from faith-based distributor Angel Studios to enter the market of more straightforward base entertainment.
Embodying the term “ex-military” in appearance and vibe (we get an early and ominous “I don’t hurt people any more” proclamation), this “big American Wario” – so says his phone-only handler – seems more suited for high-stakes extractions and special-op missions than life on a houseboat in Australia. There, he Duolingos French in between AA meetings and runs bespoke errands up to and including exotic bird delivery. But Runner, directed by action film veteran Scott Waugh (6 Below, Need for Speed) from a script by Miles Hubley and Tommy White (and not to be confused with Gal Gadot’s comparatively drab The Runner, also out this month), possesses enough unpretentious humor and B-movie sensibility to approach camp.
And thus, a seemingly straightforward assignment – drive a donated liver from the airport in Brisbane to the little girl with cancer and her frazzled mother (Leila George) languishing in Gold Coast children’s hospital – goes terribly, and dare I say enjoyably, awry. For one, the liver comes accompanied by Owen Wilson, going through the motions as Ben Bishop, a folksy bon vivant in a fedora with an annoying tendency to refer to himself in the third person. For another, there’s a seemingly endless series of cartel hitmen who, like the infamous dog who ate the ill-fated heart in One Tree Hill, are inspirationally absurd, singularly focused on the valuable organ at hand and largely mute.
One may ask, as Ben Bishop does: “What is the cartel doing in Queensland, Australia?!” Little clarity is provided, other than that rare blood-type livers apparently go for upwards of a million dollars on the black market. But no matter – Runner soon offers reason enough, along with the requisite B-movie pleasures: multiple telenovela-worthy plot twists; Ritchson coolly delivering lines such as “I’m the only one we can trust right now” while flexing his jaw; a steady escalation of gun size and hand-to-hand combat (why is the Colombian cartel reliant on Aussie biker gangs? Who knows!); the opportunity for the non-Aussie viewers among us to learn the approximate geography of the space between Brisbane and the Gold Coast; a battle of Range Rovers propulsive enough to keep one on the hook for a respectable 98 minutes. And chiefly, the deliciously sinister Rodrigo Santoro as an open wound of a cartel boss known as Damian, so in touch with his molten core, for reasons to be revealed, that he appears to be on the verge of tears in every shootout.
As former stuntman, director Waugh knows his way around a jam-packed action sequence, careening the camera around a car chase or a six-versus-one beatdown with the panache of a sports star. There’s a vertiginous video-game logic to Runner’s shin-splitting, anvil-heavy violence that at once unites the film with its innumerable Netflix brethren and also distinguishes it from them. That our POV sometimes resembles a (glorious) death spiral is perhaps for the best, as there’s little else to back it up. Though both are playing squarely to type, Ritchson and Wilson’s chemistry is at best serviceable, at worst an (admittedly soapy) distraction from the cartoonish antics at hand. Attempts at big feelings to accompany the big biceps – yes, the big American Wario has a tragic backstory – have the emotional heft of checking a box. In the film’s meta battle between action camp and sincerity camp, the former is winning by a bro-country mile – and yes, you get that needle drop, too – though I do appreciate any movie where grown men cry.
I’m reluctant to value brawn over everything else, but given the ignominious glut of straight-to-streaming background noise, it’s hard to root against a theatrical release that, knowingly or not, lands some truly cataclysmic punches with enough over-the-top silliness to force a smile. That some heart got lost in transit is, in this case, just fine.
Runner is out in Australia on 10 September and in the US and UK on 11 September
