Runner

Imagine this: two actors are cast in a movie. One has built a career smashing things so spectacularly that his co-stars are usually left staring at a trail of broken bones and mid-sized automobiles. The other has spent the last 20 years being immortalized in an internet supercut where he just keeps saying “wow” in that trademark nasal drawl.

Any thoughts on how this motley pairing might work together on screen?

Yeah, great work, Sherlock.

In reality, none of us goes into a buddy comedy like Runner hoping for anything other than the dynamic suggested by the relative weight classes of its leads, Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson. Some might be hoping for a heavier dose of smash—and if that’s you, look elsewhere, because Runner seems determined to put as much daylight as humanly possible between itself and an R rating. But mostly, we’re just hoping the gigantor-and-tater-tot casting will be as funny as that recipe has been since time immemorial, which historians generally define as “before TikTok.”

And man, are those hopes plucked from our bodies like they’re just another target of the movie’s organ-harvesting bad guys.

Runner isn’t tripped up at the starting line by its backstory. The setup is decidedly good enough to carry this thing wherever we want it to go. Ritchson is plugged in as a former Navy SEAL now working odd jobs, which range from some exposition-filling tasks of an avian nature to the film’s much more professionally-badass-required courier gig. Wilson is then bolted onto his hip as the courier’s, uh, assistant courier, tasked with making sure a liver bound for a young girl gets to her before its expiration date.

The organ itself is typecast exactly how you’d expect: very special, impossibly rare, perhaps the most desirable liver in the recorded history of livers. Naturally, that also makes it extremely valuable—and therefore a target for theft by a local cartel boss who apparently decided stealing the thing was preferable to dipping into the drug-money reserves. I’m sure the kitchen remodel went way over budget.

So the pieces are there. Big guy. Little guy. Precious cargo. Bad guys. Clock ticking. Smash some shit, let Owen Wilson say something Owen Wilson-ish, roll credits.

Except after all the usual elements are carefully arranged to unleash the circus and bring on the funny, Runner makes us remember why we didn’t care much about the “why” in the first place: we were expecting to laugh through it.

Oof.

This is why I never go to the circus.