Runner

Last night I also saw Runner and I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.  Hank Malone (Alan Ritchson) is a former Navy SEAL who is also a recovering alcoholic dealing with the trauma of losing his daughter to leukemia.  He works as a courier transporting both legal and illegal items for paying clients in Brisbane, Australia.  His latest assignment is to deliver a donor organ, needed by a critically ill seven-year-old girl, and its messenger Ben Bishop (Owen Wilson) to a hospital an hour away before it loses viability.  Mayhem ensues when they are pursued by Damian Zadivar (Rodrigo Santoro), the leader of a brutal Colombian drug cartel, who may or may not want to sell it on the black market.  The story is simple but it features some fun and thrilling action set pieces and, even though it seems like they have been edited to get a PG-13 rating, they are still plenty violent for an Angel Studios release.  I especially loved an extended sequence featuring hand to hand combat between Hank and Damian in a hospital corridor that culminates over the gurney of the little girl waiting for the transplant.  It is absolutely relentless (Leila George, who plays the mother of the little girl, even gets in on the action).  Ritchson seems to be the next big action star in the same vein as Jason Statham and he gives an intense physical performance that is fun to watch.  He also adds some humanity to the character with quite a few poignant moments with Wilson who also acts as an obnoxious entertaining foil to his straight man (I laughed out loud at a running bit between them involving an exotic parrot that Hank was unable to deliver).  Santoro is a great villain (although I am not sure why he inexplicably speaks Portuguese throughout) because, even though he is ruthless, he is not entirely unsympathetic because he has a compelling motivation for what he does.  This is something you would usually see on a streaming platform rather than the big screen but it is so much better than I expected.  I recommend it to fans of action thrillers.