Runner Review: Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson Deserve a Better Movie

Runner is worth watching if you are the kind of viewer who wants a car chase for what a car chase is. Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson have real chemistry, and Scott Waugh stages the fights, the shootouts and the chases with the fluency of a working stuntman. The film wrapped around them is generic, extremely gory and unsure what it wants to be. The audience is split down the middle, and the split is the honest verdict.

Spoiler-free verdict: Worth it for the action, and only for the action. A 97-minute buddy thriller shot in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, with two actors who sell the partnership and a script that does not. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 78 percent from 63 critic reviews. The audience numbers pull in opposite directions, and we explain why below.

What Runner is about

This is the Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson film released by Angel Studios in September 2026. It is not The Runner, the Kevin Macdonald thriller starring Gal Gadot that came out the same month, and it is not the Spanish drama of the same name. The tagline is the whole pitch: NEXT-DAY DELIVERY ISN'T AN OPTION.

Hank Malone (Ritchson) is an American living in Australia, a former military man with a year of sobriety behind him and a dead daughter behind that. He works as a runner, which means he carries things for a boss named Iggy: a politician out of a bender, a rare bird in a custody dispute, and then, on the last job of the day, a medical package from the airport. Inside the package is a liver, and it is going to a seven-year-old girl named Ellie who has cancer and a blood type so rare it is worth a million dollars on the black market.

The liver comes with its courier, Ben Bishop (Wilson), a fast talker in a fedora who refers to himself in the third person and who cannot be talked out of coming along. The two of them have three hours before the organ is no longer viable. A Colombian cartel operating out of Queensland wants the liver back, and its boss, Damian (Rodrigo Santoro), has personal reasons for wanting it. What follows is a run from the airport in Brisbane to a children's hospital on the Gold Coast, with an ex-wife's house, a remote house and a hospital wing along the way, and a battle of Range Rovers in the middle of it.

Cast and performances

Ritchson is the movie. He plays Hank as a man built for violence who is trying not to do it, and Frank Scheck at The Hollywood Reporter noticed the contradiction immediately: the character announces that he does not hurt people anymore, and by the end of the film he has not lived up to it. Scheck called him "the most impressive action star to come along in a while", low-key and charismatic, and the two men work because their bodies do different things. Wilson's Ben is all noise, and the noise is funny.

Horton at The Guardian was less sure of it. "Ritchson and Wilson's chemistry is at best serviceable, at worst an (admittedly soapy) distraction from the cartoonish antics at hand." Peter Sobczynski at RogerEbert.com saw what the pair of them are actually selling, and it was the performance rather than the picture: the film "turns out to be more involving than one could have plausibly expected", with Ritchson one of the most interesting of the new crop of action stars.

Around them, Rodrigo Santoro plays Damian, and Horton described him, in his phrase, as an open wound of a cartel boss on the verge of tears in every shootout. Leila George plays Kate, Ellie's mother, and Scheck found the script's handling of her surprisingly full of emotional depth.

What works

The action. Waugh is a former stuntman, and Horton noticed the effect: Waugh "knows his way around a jam-packed action sequence, careening the camera around a car chase or a six-versus-one beatdown with the panache of a sports star". There is a vertigo to it. The six-on-one fight, the Range Rovers on the Gold Coast, the shootout that runs through a hospital wing. William Bibbiani at TheWrap said the balance is the achievement: "Scott Waugh knows better. He does a masterful job of balancing funny characters and seriously sick beatdowns and explosions."

The running. A courier on a deadline, in a car that is wrong for the road, in a country that is wrong for the chase. The film takes the geography seriously, filming in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, and Horton found the result funny and strange at once, with Ben asking the question the plot never answers, what on earth the cartel is doing in Queensland.

The bird. There is a rare breed of parakeet in a cage that Hank keeps carrying through the chase, and it is the stupidest and best thing in the film. William Bibbiani at TheWrap noted that the picture throws in a cute endangered bird that says peekaboo, just to sweeten the deal. Frank Scheck at The Hollywood Reporter did not care for it, and still clocked Hank carrying the parakeet in its birdcage around even while being chased by the bad guys as one of the comic touches the mayhem wears badly.

What doesn't

The gore, and what it does to the comedy. Scheck named the problem exactly: "The problem is that the action becomes so relentless, so explicitly gory, that a bad aftertaste sets in." A parakeet in a birdcage is not funny when the last three fights have gone from shootings to axings. Sobczynski noticed the same mismatch from the other end, calling the film pretty violent from start to finish and certainly more violent than one might expect from something being released by Angel Studios, a distributor more associated with faith-related productions.

The emotional beats. Scheck wrote that a tragic plot element in the final act seems unearned, and Horton agreed about the sentiment. Horton's verdict on the sentiment is that the attempts at big feelings to accompany the big biceps have the emotional heft of checking a box, and that in the meta battle between action camp and sincerity camp, the former is winning by a bro-country mile.

The math. This is Bibbiani's objection and it is the sharpest of the four. "There comes a point in 'Runner' where the math stops adding up. Our heroes are fighting to save one person's life, but in the process countless other people die, and not all of them are bad guys." The cartel asks for the organ to save a mother, and the film never lets that question sit.

The screenplay. Sobczynski called it "meat-and-potatoes filmmaking at its most basic, the kind where all of the ingredients involved are, at best, utility-grade", and compared the film to the Transporter franchise with a redemption arc shoehorned in by the writers. Scheck put the film's value in the stunt work instead, and did credit the script with surprising emotional depths in its handling of Hank's tragic backstory and the sick child's fiercely protective mother.

What audiences say

All figures checked on October 21, 2026. Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 78 percent from 63 critic reviews, with an 89 percent Popcornmeter from more than 500 verified ratings. Metacritic has a Metascore of 55 from 15 critic reviews, labelled Mixed or Average, plus a user score of 5.6 from 38 user ratings. IMDb has it at 6.2 out of 10 from 16,000 ratings. Letterboxd's member average is a weighted 2.84 from 29,674 ratings, with 11,463 written reviews, and the most common single grade there is three stars. TMDB has it at 8.3 from 675 votes.

The interesting thing about this film is how far apart those numbers are. TMDB's 8.3 comes from 675 votes, the smallest of the pools that disagree with it, because IMDb at 16,000 ratings, Letterboxd at 29,674 and Metacritic's 15 critic reviews all land lower. The one audience measure that agrees with TMDB is Rotten Tomatoes' 89 percent Popcornmeter, and that one rests on 500 or more verified ratings, fewer than IMDb's 16,000. The two big audience pools say the same thing, and the one that says something else has the fewest votes behind it.

Box Office Mojo's figures, read on October 21, 2026, put the film at $14,455,523 domestic and $18,029,340 worldwide, from a United States release on September 11, 2026 that opened with $6,462,291. Wikipedia's summary of the same records gives a budget of $35 million to $45 million, which means the film did not come close to covering its costs in theaters.

Where to watch Runner

It is on Angel Studios, which is a subscription service, and JustWatch, which checked 376 streaming services on October 21, 2026, confirms it. The same check lists rental and purchase on Amazon Video, the Apple TV Store and Fandango At Home, and a DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon DVD / Blu-ray. Amazon Prime Video appears on the JustWatch page only as a promoted subscription for related titles, not as an offer for this film, but William Bibbiani at TheWrap wrote that the picture actually debuts on Amazon Prime, and Angel Studios runs a Prime Video channel. TMDB's United States watch providers agree with the Angel Studios, Amazon Video, Apple TV Store and Fandango At Home listing. The certificate is PG-13. The run time is 97 minutes, which The Hollywood Reporter and JustWatch both list as 1 hour 37 minutes and Rotten Tomatoes rounds to 1 hour 38 minutes.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our Runner streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is Runner worth watching? Yes, for the fights and the two men in them, and you should know before you press play that you are buying ninety-seven minutes of set pieces wrapped around a script that treats the ethics of collateral damage as a rounding error. Waugh stages a car chase with the fluency of a working stuntman, and Ritchson is a genuinely new kind of action lead, a man who looks like a weapon and plays like a man trying to stop being one. The film around them is not up to the performance. Watch it for the action and the bird, and keep expectations off the rest.

Spoiler warning: the ending of Runner

Hank refuses to hand the liver back when Iggy begs him to, and the cartel kills Iggy for it. At his ex-wife Monica's house, Hank gives her the parakeet in thanks for a bike, and tells her the truth about Isabel, the daughter who died of leukemia and who was obsessed with France, which is why he was learning the language. The pair are ambushed on the way to the car and Ben is taken.

Ben is held at a remote house and questioned by Damian, who finally explains that the liver is for his dying mother. Hank breaks in and gets Ben out, and Ben puts a shot into Damian in the confusion. Ben and the cooler have both been hit. They stop at a gas station for ice, Ben gives Hank the cooler's code, and an ambulance picks them up. The cartel follows the ambulance, and Ben dies of his gunshot wound.

At the hospital, Hank is told the surgery may be compromised. The leak is inside: Ellie's nurse, Julie, whose brother the cartel kidnapped to perform the surgery on Damian's mother. Damian arrives, kills Julie, and takes the cooler. Hank fights him through the hospital wing and kills him, and then collapses from his own injuries.

Hank recovers. He visits Ellie, whose operation was a success. Some time later he takes a holiday to Paris, for Isabel.