Runner: Movie Review

Cast: Alan Ritchson, Owen Wilson, Rodrigo Santoro, Leila George, Adriana Barraza, Peta Sergeant, Scarlett Crabtree, Geraldine Hakewill, Kate Box, Goran D. Kleut, Cecilia Toussaint, and Tommy Archer.
Director: Scott Waugh

Angel Studios takes a swerve away from its more contemplative faith-based fare for this action-led buddy comedy with a darkness at its heart that the filmmakers are too scared to show.

Reacher man mountain Alan Ritchson is Hank, a former navy SEAL who works as a runner in Brisbane, delivering whatever is needed as he tries to work thorough his sobriety and issues with his former wife and dead daughter.

However, on the day he celebrates his first year clear, he's given the job of delivering a medical parcel to a hospital. It should be a simple job as the cargo is a liver for a sick young girl (complete with thick Coca-Cola glasses, blonde hair and lisp), but the pick-up comes complete with a jabbering human element - its courier Ben (Wilson in vaguely irritating form.) 

But Ben and Hank aren't the only ones who want the liver - as a cartel group, headed up by a sneering caricature of a Cartel figure (Santoro) tries to steal the liver, one of the rarest in the world and blessed with golden blood. (No really.)

What transpires is something to behold - in both good and bad ways.

Runner mixes bloodless ultra-violence with the kind of quipping buddy Odd Couple road trip comedy you'd expect. But an extremely odd mix of tone meshed with some laugh out loud moments and some of the cheesiest action sequences and plot turns you'd see make it possibly a contender for somehow both the worst film of the year and yet also the most cheerily entertaining in every throwaway sense of the word.

Solid action and some well-choreographed bouts of kickass action see Ritchson barely flexing the kind of muscle he displays in Reacher, while Wilson doesn't exactly dig deep for his annoyingly upbeat road trip companion.

It's a curious mix of Christian ethics, racist stereotypes, gunshot violence where nobody is left with blood and cloyingly predictable plot twists that follows.

On top of swirling cameras, a cute Coca-Cola glasses wearing kid, sneering villains and kills that suggest violence but show nothing all create a film that is off to an unusual start when pre-titles credits declare that the Angels Guild, a community of 2500 members approve of what's about to transpire.

It's terrible in every sense of the word, yet in among the utter averageness of what transpires, both Ritchson and Wilson somehow manage to acquit themselves in a movie that aims high, fails miserably and yet somehow, you can't stop watching.