'Runner' Review: A Formulaic but Satisfying Action Thriller
By Dan Bremner - September 17, 2026
The new buddy action-comedy starring Alan Ritchson where a former soldier finds himself in a brutal race against time when a critical medical delivery makes him and his unlikely partner the target of a ruthless cartel. As the mission spirals into a deadly manhunt, every detour, delay and bullet pushes them closer to failure.
I’m a big fan of Reacher, so I’ll watch Ritchson in almost anything at this point, even after some of the weaker streaming films he’s taken. Runner looks exactly like the kind of mid-budget action-comedy that usually gets dumped on Amazon Prime. It even shares its title with another action film released the same month. Against expectations, it turns out to be a blast, and a rare solid entry from Scott Waugh, a director whose catalogue of low-effort action films is otherwise pretty dire. Expend4bles would have finished most careers. Waugh keeps working.
Ritchson and Owen Wilson’s chemistry carry the film. Ritchson plays Hank Malone, a stoic recovering former Navy SEAL and courier, with a gigantic physical presence, dry humour and a bit of genuine emotional weight around sobriety and loss. Wilson plays the talkative medical courier Ben Bishop and supplies the comic relief. Their mismatched tough-guy-and-wisecracking-sidekick dynamic generates consistent banter and odd-couple energy that lifts the generic material above pure formula. Rodrigo Santoro is a strong, intense antagonist, relentlessly pursuing the pair across Australia and killing almost anyone who crosses his path.
Scott Waugh, a former stuntman, stages the action with real force. The car chases, fistfights, shootouts and improvised combat have weight and momentum. The violence is frequently gnarly. More than one sequence involves a car headrest being driven through someone’s throat. Fortunately the UK release is the uncut version, as Angel Studios’ (who release primarily faith-based films) US cut tones down the violence and language for a more family-friendly release. The British print keeps the carnage intact, a rare win for us.
The 98-minute runtime helps. The high-concept race-against-time structure of delivering a time-sensitive organ while pursued keeps the film moving. Detours and escalating threats arrive at a steady pace that rarely slows down, just as you get a smaller character moment, you know you're about to see human tank Ritchson absolutely murder a handful of people just minutes later.
The biggest problem is tone. Runner never fully decides whether it wants to be a goofy buddy comedy, a brutal action film or a sentimental story about redemption. Light banter and the parakeet sit next to extreme gore, and the shifts can feel lumpy. The sentiment sometimes undercuts the fun instead of supporting it, leaning fully into sanctimonious territory by the end in ways that are unexpectedly cheesy and unintentionally hilarious.
Runner works overtime to sell the cuteness and vulnerability of the dying child who needs the organ. It keeps returning to the kid hooked up to IV drips and hospital equipment, continuing to deteriorate, with heartstring-tugging beats with the despair and desperation of the mother for good measure, hammering the emotional urgency to absurd levels. The harder it pushes, the more calculated and manipulative the sentiment feels.
Production values stay modest. Some visual effects on moving backgrounds look cheap. A few of the “long takes” suffer from very obvious digital seams where shots have been stitched together, breaking the illusion of continuous action and giving things an awkward jank. The score leans on overly used music tracks you've heard twelve too many times in action films (“Kickstart my Heart” really?). The overall feel remains mid-tier, closer to a solid streaming action film than a studio event picture. The Australian setting does offer a strong and unique location, but there is something overly digital and cheap about the look overall.
Runner is formulaic and tonally messy, yet Ritchson and Wilson’s odd-couple chemistry plus Waugh’s committed, often brutal action make it an easy, satisfying watch. If you want muscular, no-frills genre filmmaking that doesn’t overstay its welcome, this is worth catching.
'Runner' released in cinemas on September 11, 2026.
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Dan Bremner
Writer
Dan is a writer from Guildford with a love for all things genre, schlocky, and thoroughly '80s, and a part-time philanthropist.
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