Runner: Throw a Liver and Plenty of Cheese on the Barbie, Mate!
By Chris Knight
Rating: A-
There are quite a few good lines in Runner, a ’90s-style action flick that would have starred Jean-Claude Van Damme back in the day. But the one that stuck with me was when Owen Wilson’s character asks: “What is the cartel doing in Queensland, Australia?"
It’s a fair question, and it never gets satisfactorily answered by director Scott Waugh or his pair of writers, though the press notes say the story was originally set in L.A. But if you can overlook that geographic oddity and a few other credibility gaps, you should have a popcorn-munching, mindless good time.
Alan Ritchson (TV’s Jack Reacher) must deliver a bloody liver, mate!
Alan Ritchson (TV’s Jack Reacher) stars as Hank Malone, an American who works as a kind of jack-of-all-dangerous-trades in Brisbane. Movies like this like to give their leading man a sympathetic foible like a lost daughter, a divorce, a substance-recovery journey or an unusual hobby. Runner deals out all four. Hank is learning French.
His day takes a turn when he is tasked with picking up a package from the local airport. It’s a liver, on its way to an ailing little girl, and it’s accompanied by loquacious transplant manager Ben Bishop, played by Owen Wilson.
Wilson dials his genial folksiness up to the max, though sadly he never utters a line like: “I’m just here to deliver a liver, man.” (Also, using the title The Liver Deliverer would have prevented the confusion of releasing Runner the same week that a different movie, The Runner, appears on Amazon Prime.)
Anyway, Hank and Ben soon find themselves beset by a bevy of cartel baddies led by Rodrigo Santoro as Damian Zaldívar. He wants the liver too, you see, and is nothing if not persistent in going after it.
Waugh’s action-movie credentials include 2012’s Act of Valor and the more recent Hidden Strike (a Jackie Chan movie sometimes billed as Project X-Traction) and the fourth Expendables movie. He keeps the action barrelling forward in this one and employs some inventive camerawork in the many chase scenes and fight scenarios, including an axe-based ode to The Shining.
But he also leans on some annoying cliches of the genre, like roads where all the cars are conveniently spaced in a checkerboard pattern for easier high-speed passing. Or bad guys who unload their weapons into a vehicle in the one scene where it’s deserted, and are otherwise way more cautious with their guns.
But yeah, good dialogue, like the scene where Hank is injured and being attended to by a hospital worker. “You’re losing a lot of blood,” she tells him. He grits his teeth and growls: “I’ve got plenty left.”
Even inanimate objects get in on the act. The liver carrying case gets damaged at one point, and occasionally chirps: “Warning! Organ storage temperature too high! Action required!” And darned if the film doesn’t make good on that request.
Runner. Directed by Scott Waugh. Starring Alan Ritchson, Owen Wilson, and Rodrigo Santoro. Opens Sept. 11 in cinemas.