During her routine morning run, a high-powered London lawyer receives a phone call from a mysterious man who demands she follow his orders or her son will be killed. Some of the movie’s plot points are tough to swallow, and there’s painful thumping and foul language in the mix. But the mom’s heroics win the day.
We live in a world that’s tangled up in digital connections. Even as we walk through busy, crowded city streets we can be isolated and insulated by the phone that we stare at or listen to. Of course, if the wrong person figured out how to misuse that fact, if they determined how to breach our completely insecure digital walls, that phone dependence could become a very powerful tool. Or a weapon.
So it is with Maia Marten.
Maia lives an organized life. She’s a high-powered London lawyer. A loving single mom. And, of course, she’s a woman with her own set of needs and desires. But she keeps each of those sections of her life neatly tucked away in their own organized compartment.
This morning, for instance, Maia is arranging the things she needs for today’s important and very visible court trail. She’s designed her case perfectly with the right evidence, the right witness. She’s already made a call to confirm that the witness will be at the courthouse at the appointed time. Maia is certain of her success.
First though, she needs to see to her young son off to school. She makes sure Noah has all the things he needs. Maia doublechecks his insulin pack. She sees him off with a smile and a kiss.
Then Maia determines to give her romantic interest, Ted, a quick call. It’s been nice. He’s a good and caring man, a solid lawyer. They’ve worked well together. But letting their feelings go any further could be problematic. It just doesn’t fit with everything else right now. And with a simple phone call she nips that potential problem in the bud.
Ahhh.
Now it’s time for her regular morning run. That’ll work out the kinks. A refreshing run in the park will help Maia push away the stress of life, clear her mind. She straps her phone to her arm, wraps the running headphones at her temples, and she’s off. There’s plenty of time. Everything is neatly ordered. Life is good.
The call from Noah comes in about 10 minutes into Maia’s run-music compilation. She slows to a walk and smiles as she answers. What did Noah forget this time?
But it’s not Noah. The call comes from a man who hacked her phone earlier in the morning. He’s downloaded all her messages and files, seen all her pictures, listened to her morning calls. He’s tracked Maia’s every move. He’s kidnapped her diabetic son and put him in a hyperglycemic coma.
Yes, this unknown caller is an organized sort, himself. And his demands are straightforward: Maia will have an hour to run to the downtown hotel where they’re keeping her star witness … and she will kill him.
In the meantime, the caller will watch Noah. He’ll watch and listen in on everything Maia does—every word, every step. And she will need to follow his every command.
“You follow my rules, Noah lives,” the caller says. “Disobey … he dies.”
Maia is a mom who will do anything to protect her son, and she drives herself to extremes—enduring being hit by a car and taking bruising falls—as she runs to find and rescue him. Ted turns out to be a good man, indeed. Even after Maia has ended their relationship, he takes extra steps to help her and her son.
During her exhausting run, Maia goes to a Temple of Venus, as ordered. Later, as she runs through the streets of London, she slips into a church to catch her breath and escape pursuing police. She clasps her hands in front of her and cries while sitting in a church pew. A priest then asks if she needs help. “If you’re in pain, there are always options,” the priest says. “His blood is our blood and He bled for our sins.” But then that declaration is, seemingly, mocked by Maia’s next statement about the amount of blood in the human body (a reference to something the mystery caller said to her earlier).
A man in a subway car declares that people should, “give up the desires of the flesh so you can spend eternity in heaven and not in hellfire.”
The caller tells us that he found hidden sexy photos on Maia’s phone. We see several bikini and underwear snapshots and a photo of a woman’s bare legs in a bathtub. The caller then asks, “Were these for Ted?” Maia calls the caller a “perv.”
Maia notices a young couple making out in a subway car. During her run through the city, Maia strips down to a sports bra and pulls on a different shirt.
We see Maia running long, excruciating distances to follow the caller’s orders. She stumbles and falls over people in the city. And she runs into an intersection where a driver accidentally hits her with a vehicle. The pummels and tumbles leave Maia scratched and torn; she sports a bloody cut on her forehead.
We never see Noah suffer, but we are told he’s in a hyperglycemic coma with only a short span of time to survive. The camera looks at his unconscious form, with an attached IV, several times. We are shown pictures of two women who got shot. There are bloody wounds on their heads.
Maia jumps out of the back of a moving vehicle, tumbling onto the road. She runs through dark subway tunnels and jumps out of the way of a speeding train. Policemen run into speeding cyclists, everyone tumbling together in a pile. The unknown caller pulls a small bundle of dynamite out of his bag. He threatens to blow up an entire hotel floor before Maia convinces him not to.
Early on, the caller directs Maia to a place where she can pick up Noah’s backpack, where the caller has stashed a gun. Maia carries the weapon from then on. She uses it to pistol whip a male thief, points it at a pursuing policeman and fires it into the air in warning.
[Spoiler Warning] At one point, Maia tells the caller that she killed her own father after he beat her mother. The camera shows us a close-up shot of the man’s bloodied knuckles (presumably from when he hit his wife), and then another close-up of his head on the floor with his blood seeping into a spilled puddle of milk. However, we later learn that this story was fabricated. It also appears that Maia shoots a man, blowing open bloody holes in his chest and abdomen. However, this also proves to be false, completely staged for the benefit of the mystery caller. We later see the supposedly murdered victim pulling fake blood packs out from under his shirt.
There are two f-words and three s-words in the dialogue. God’s name is blended with “d–n” once.
As mentioned, Noah is a diabetic and we see him unconscious and attached to an IV drip containing some drug. The caller says the substance will kill him if given too much time. Later, Maia gives the boy a shot of glucagon to revive him. After getting struck by a vehicle, Maia awakes in an ambulance with an IV in her own arm. She rips out the needle and continues running.
During their digital conversations, the caller states that Maia had Noah “on her own,” suggesting that she used a sperm donor. But neither the caller nor Maia give us any more details. During her run, Maia steals several people’s phones in an effort to contact someone for help. She also steals clothes and water from a roadside vendor. We see Maia vomit from pain after jumping out of an ambulance.
The Runner keeps its 84-minute pace quick in an effort to distract its audience from considering the many contrivances piling up on screen. (I sometimes found myself thinking less about the current story twist and more about how exhausting this film must have been for its ever-running and perspiring star.)
Beyond that, though, there is some unfortunate foul language that viewers will have to tread through here and quite a lot of female-protagonist thumping in this cinematic foot race.
However, if you’re able to jump past those potholes and suitably suspend your disbelief, there’s an entertaining tale here about a mother fighting for her son’s life while trying to outfox an invisible and seemingly inscrutable foe.
Yes, this pic feels more like a tossed-together short story than an epic novel. But sometimes we just need a short break for a hard-running hero’s tale.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
