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CAST: Alan Ritchson, Owen Wilson, Rodrigo Santoro, Leila George, Adriana Barraza, Sullivan Stapleton, Peta Sergeant, and Geraldine Hakewill. DIrected by Scott Waugh.
REVIEW: A straight-ahead ticking clock action thriller, “Runner” is at its best when it trusts its charismatic stars, and not the stunts, to carry the show.
Alan Ritchson plays Jack Reacher… er, Hank Malone, a former Navy Seal now attempting to live a quiet life in Australia. Newly sober, he works for a delivery service that specializes in transporting unusual items. “I don’t hurt people anymore,” he says, delivering a line that, given the context, assures us that his days as a bruiser are long from over.
His latest delivery comes fraught with problems. Charged with delivering a human liver to a dying seven-year-old, he has three hours to get the “medical package” to the hospital or the patient will die. “There’s nothing in the world that’s going to keep us from getting to you,” Hank tells the girl’s concerned mother (Leila George).
Getting in the way of the promise is a chatty medical courier named Ben (Owen Wilson) and cartel members who want the liver for their own use. Determined to complete the delivery Hank leans into his old Navy Seal training. “I’m not a man that people successfully [mess] with,” he says.
A throwback to the buddy action comedies of the 1980s and 90s, “Runner” pairs the muscle-bound Ritchson with Wilson’s comedic chops, which are as well developed as Ritchson’s impressive abs. They’re a compelling pair, sharing barbs and bullets in equal measure.
Former stunt-performer-turned-director Scott Waugh comes up with several new ways to smash up Land Rovers and stages several “Reacher-esque” knock-down-drag-out fight sequences that showcase Ritchson’s way with a fist to the face. They dispatch dozens of cartel members. Possibly hundreds of them in fairly spectacular ways, but the villains, including the ruthless Damian Zaldívar (Rodrigo Santoro), are so nondescript and thinly written it’s hard top care when they go. They may as well be wearing the “Star Trek” red shirt, a sure-fire sign they aren’t going to make it to the next scene.
“Runner” doesn’t try and reinvent the buddy action movie. Formulaic, although it must be said there is at least one big shock you may not see coming, it plays like an homage to the buddy action genre with some amped-up action. Still, as violently visceral as those scenes are, the film is at its best when Ritchson and Wilson throwing puns, not punches.
“300: Rise of an Empire,” the sequel to the 2006 Gerard Butler ab-fest, should rightly be called “300: Buckets of Blood” or perhaps “300 Sweaty, Screaming Men & A Lady.”
A parallel story to the original film, the movie shows what else was happening while Spartan King Leonidas (Gerard Butler, who only appears briefly in flashbacks) and three hundred brave men battled against Persian “god-King” Xerxes’s (Rodrigo Santoro) 300,000 soldiers.
This one is a showdown between the freedom-loving Themistocles of Athens (Sullivan Stapleton, from HBO Canada’s “Strike Back”) and Artemisia of Caria (Eva Green), and that old foe of democracy, King Xerxes. Once again the Greeks are wildly outnumbered but put up a valiant fight against Artemisia, who not only wants to beat the Greek army but humiliate them as well.
This is a manly movie, filled with super macho advice like “don’t get killed on the first day,” and “there is no more noble action than lying in the blood of your brothers.” It’s a violent, testosterone soaked story, drenched in gore and more battle scenes per minute than any war movie in recent memory. There’s so much combat that a fight choreographer appears to have called in to devise the one and only sex scene.
The amount of man flesh on display might shame most of us into renewing our gym memberships, but swinging the biggest sword is Artemisia. She’s ruthless, driven by thoughts of revenge and is an all round awesome movie villain. How evil is she? Early on she plants a kiss on the lips of a man she’s just decapitated… and gets nastier from there.
The movie mimics “300‘s” highly stylized visuals. Much of the film resembles gothic oil paintings, but the addition of 3D introduces a “splatter zone” effect in the theatre as gallons of gore are sprayed across the screen. Also, like the first film, slow motion is used to emphasize the action. It’s so prevalent that if you played all the slo mo scenes in real time the 140-minute movie would only be about an hour long.
“300” was a heavy metal blast of sword and steel, an epic story with larger-than-life visuals but almost ten years on “300: Rise of an Empire” feels a bit old hat. A great villain and some fun action scenes almost make up for the plodding plot but the brutishness of the storytelling makes the original feel positively light hearted by comparison.
