"Unabomber" Review

 From 1978 to 1995, Ted Kaczynski sent 16 package bombs which killed three and injured 23 and prompted the largest FBI manhunt in history. How he was apprehended and supposition of how he may've been sent down this path of anarchic destruction and terrorism is the subject of the latest Netflix Original movie which goes by his nickname, Unabomber.

Opening in 1995 after the Washington Post published the Unabomber Manifesto, a 35,000-word screed against technology and industrialized society, FBI Agent Joanne Miller (Shailene Woodley, Motor City) is frustrated that her linguistics approach to forming a suspect profile isn't being taken seriously enough by the Old Boys Club at the Bureau.

We then flash back to 1958 where a 16-year-old math prodigy Kaczynski (Jacob Tremblay, Room, Wonder, grown up now) is a Harvard freshman who applies to be what he thinks is a philosophical debate club run by professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe, Virtuosity) and his assistant Christiana Morgan (Annabelle Wallis, Mutiny) who had created the Thematic Apperception Test which is similar to the Rorschach Test in diagnosing mental issues. The club turns out to be series of harsh one-on-one sessions where the young Kaczynski is verbally abused by "Mr. C" (Gus Halper, The Shards), who violates the rules while Kaczynski's responses are filmed and monitored electronically.

Back in the future, Miller is contacted by Kaczynski's estranged brother, David (Matthew Kevin Anderson, Eternity), whose wife believes the Manifesto sounds like stuff Ted has written and he decided to bring her suspicions to the FBI in order to clear Ted. They have been estranged over two decades, but he still worries about his big brother. Miller's superior doesn't think this has merit and forbids her to investigate, so of course she takes a couple days off and travels to Montana to see what she can find.

Meanwhile in the past, young Ted is become more frustrated by the sessions until Morgan finally lets him see behind the curtain as to what the whole process has been about. Ted is outraged at the duplicity and begins to construct a package for Murray that's similar to the bomb package we've been shown.

Unabomber is clearly trying to construct an impression that Murray's experiment and emotional abuse of Ted set him on the path to blowing up a lot of people 20 years later, but doesn't convincingly connect the dots. When doing my usual post-biopic fact check to see how much was true and how much invention, this impression remained unchallenged. Most distractingly is the fact that Miller is an imaginary composite character clearly fashioned to get a women in the cast (during the end credits, real photos of Kaczynski and the FBI agents at his cabin where he was arrested and no women are present) and that David Kaczynski approached the FBI because he did believe Ted was the Unabomber, not trying to clear him. Why change that?

While the performances are all respectable and the insights somewhat provocative, Unabomber is just too flat and too fictitious to be compelling or informational. It lacks necessary boom.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"Outland" 4K Review

 While many science fiction movies maintain high levels of general remembrance from stone classics like Blade Runner or Aliens to second-tier goodies like Event Horizon and 2010: The Year We Make Contact, there is a category of almost-forgotten B-movies like Screamers or even ones with a legendary star like Sean Connery in writer-director Peter Hyams' space-set spin on High Noon, 1981's Outland.

 Set on Jupiter's moon Io, Connery plays Federal Marshal William O'Niel keeping the peace on the Con-Am 27 titanium mining station. After a few workers die in bizarre, grisly circumstance - one (John Ratzenberger from Cheers!) hallucinates spiders all over him and he cuts his space suit open; another skips the suit entirely and goes outside with one on; a third (Steven Berkoff, Beverly Hills Cop) freaks out and starts harming a hooker, getting himself shot by O'Neil's Deputy Montone (James B. Sikking, Hill Street Blues) - O'Neil investigates with the assistance of station Doctor Marian Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen, Cheers) who discovers the presence of a synthetic narcotic one man's blood which allows them to do massive amounts of work and collect big bonuses, but after 10-11 months (of a one-year tour of duty) drives some people crazy.

When O'Neil takes his concerns to the station general manager, Mark Sheppard (Peter Boyle, Young Frankenstein), he is waved off because productivity is high, the corporate bosses are happy, and why doesn't O'Neil take the bribes he's being offered like the rest of the deputies. On top of this, O'Neil's wife, Carol (Kika Markham), tired of these postings, has left him and taken their son Paul (Nicholas Barnes) with him to the space station in preparation for a flight back to Earth, which Paul has never been to.

 When O'Neil's interference in Sheppard's operation becomes too much of a problem, he sends for assassins to come and eliminate the monkey in the wrench and puts the word out to the station inhabitants to not get in their way. With the shuttle's arrival counting down, a lone O'Neil prepares for them as all his deputies have chosen to take a powder as well.

What Outland lacks in narrative complexity it makes up for in visual detail. Art Director Malcolm Middleton (who'd do Event Horizon 16 years later) and costume designer John Mollo (Star Wars, Alien) lean hard into the dingy industrial aesthetics that Alien had - some even head canon that Outland's Con-Am exists in the same universe as Weyland-Yutani - with Hyams lighting his sets with plenty of haze and darkness. It also marked the debut of the Introvision process which allowed live elements and miniatures to be filmed together without blue screens and compositing.

I must've seen this several times at the dollar show as a teen because so much of it is familiar even though I don't even own it on any format that I recall. In this 4K rip from the Arrow Video release, the haze doesn't dither and dark areas don't crush; the dimness and hazy details are intentional. Colors like the orange of Jupiter or the reds and blues of uniforms and spacesuits are rich. If anything, the resolution works against the huge miniature sets, making them look like models and not a massive complex.

Connery is suitably grizzled as a lawman in a lawless post, though it's never explained why he's been stuck out there. Lazarus remarks on how the best and brightest typically don't get assigned to the astronomical sticks and doctors are usually one shuttle ahead of a malpractice suit. Sheppard is a one-and-a-half-note character on the page and Boyle plays it that way. Again, Outland is more style than substance, but worth a watch if not quite a buy.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on streaming/cable.

"Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs That's the Weight of the World)" Review

In honor of it being the 21st night of September, it's time to catch up on Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs That's the Weight of the World), director Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's documentary about the seminal 1970s R&B/soul/funk band that influenced many artists including Prince, Michael Jackson, and even Stevie Wonder.

Focusing on founder Maurice White, who was abandoned by his mother at age 5, an event that would color his personal and professional relationships forever, the doc traces his interest in music which led him to move from his birthplace of Memphis to Chicago where he became a session drummer for Chess Records and then joining noted jazz figure Ramsay Lewis's trio. Wanting to express himself more, he left the prestigious jazz gig and formed what would eventually become Earth, Wind & Fire.

It was initially a bumpy start as White and company struggled to find a focus that would cross over. One show opening for Parliament-Funkadelic resulted in such a musical beatdown by the headliners that one EWF member jumped over to P-Funk, the band members who were still around after White reshuffled the lineup were haunted by the grooves, and mastermind George Clinton would taunt them for a decade about it. But they took the lessons they learned and evolved to the point where their massive breakout hit, "Shining Star", was the inspiration for Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" (which later became the music for Will Smith's "Wild Wild West"), a tidbit that shocks an off-camera Questlove during the Wonder interview.

White also realized they needed a SHOW to go with the music and he hired the Tony Award-winning choreographer of The Wiz to stage the show and magician Doug Henning to create illusions like a levitating his half-brother/bassist Verdine White while he played. Fortunes were spent on elaborate costumes in an Afro-Futurist style, but eventually the costs of putting on such as an extravaganza took a toll on the operation, much to the chagrin of the band members who weren't being paid very much considering. White's complicated personal life and business distractions drove further wedges between family and colleagues.

While Questlove does an OK job of laying out the life and legacy and influences EWF had, the overall pacing feels a bit slow and the coverage superficial at times. Since White died of Parkinson's disease in 2016, only archival footage and audio is available and his brief was clearly not to tear down the reputation and renown of seminal artist and his band. While flawed, Earth, Wind & Fire is a good primer of one of the Seventies biggest acts.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on HBO Max.

"Nimrods" Review

 When you hear "Green Day movie" you'd probably think it'd be a biopic of the band or perhaps a concert film or maybe an adaptation of the surprisingly decent musical that was made of American Idiot. Farther down the possibilities list would be a movie produced with a story by Green Day where they also cameoed, but that's what Nimrods is, the titled both a description of the nimrod kids but also a play on their 1997 album, Nimrod.

Tommy (Mason Thames, The Black Phone) and Fred (Kylr Coffman, Outbreak) are obnoxious high school students who have a band with their nerdy friend Chad (Ryan Foust, Marry Me) called Analog Dogs. Tommy lives with his widowed mother, Jodie (Jenna Fischer, The Office), and his older brother, Wayne (Keen Ruffalo, Mark's son), in Kansas City.

Fans of Green Day, Tommy and Fred go to record store appearance and give the band (played by the band themselves in not particularly convincing performances) a demo tape with Tommy's phone number on it. While there, drummer Tré Cool calls Tommy's phone and goofs on their name, calling them "Anal OG Dogs." Afterwards, they tell Wayne about the encounter and show him the call log with Tré's number.

Later, mad at the pair stranding him on the roof where he was putting up Christmas decorations, Wayne and his friend Keith (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio, Primo) prank call the guys by claiming to be Tré Cool and loving their demo tape, wanting them to open for Green Day on New Years Eve at the Los Angeles Palladium theater. Falling for the ruse, Tommy asks his Jodie if she could drive them to the gig and when she's not able, decides to steal Wayne's car and head west despite not having a driver's license.

What follows is a typical string of hijinks and misadventures as their naivete and cluelessness makes their odds of even making it to LA unlikely. Along the way Tommy meets a cool girl, Olivia (Mckenna Grace, Ghostbusters: Afterlife), who invites the band to play at a gathering with other bands including hers. Chad's mother, Deborah (Jolene Blalock, Star Trek: Enterprise), catches up to the band and is about to drag them home when embarrassing mama's boy Chad decides to take the minivan and continue the journey to their date with destiny trying to get into the show.

Last year I wasn't impressed by a Detroit-made indie called Band On The Run which was about a band trying to play SXSW and Nimrods is only marginally better due to a bigger budget - Evil Empire Live Nation are producers - and better music including unreleased Green Day tracks serving as Analog Dogs material.

Tommy and Fred aren't very appealing protagonists, the situations they find themselves in aren't particularly unique, and the ending doesn't hit in the feels as much as intended. It also drags in the pacing especially during one extended sequence involving a scary motel operated by a weird Fred Arminen which could've been completely cut without anyone noticing and only included because Armisen was in a prior movie by writer-director Lee Kirk. Kirk and Green Day collaborated on the story after Armstrong starred in Kirk's 2016 effort Ordinary World. 

If you like Green Day's music and aren't to demanding on your movies stories, Nimrods will probably entertain you somewhat, but won't give you the time of your life.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Tony" Review

The opening of Tony, the biopic about a young Anthony Bourdain - the famous chef, author, and TV host who decided a life of globe-trotting, meeting interesting foods and eating exotic peoples, plus banging Asia Argento, wasn't enough to keep living for in 2018 - is a title card with this quote from his book, Kitchen Confidential: “I was a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” It's a fitting apéritif for what follows, the depiction of young man stumbling into a new vocation while being somewhat the ass in the process.

Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) stars as Bourdain, going by "Tony" as a 19-year-old Vassar freshman with dreams of being a writer. He applies for a writing fellowship which would take him to New York and lies to his family that he got it when in reality someone else got it. Caught out, he decides to go to Provincetown, MA (at the tip of Cape Cod) to chase after Nancy (Emilia Jones, CODA), a girl he's got a crush on since high school who's a year older and told him she'd be staying for the summer.

When he gets there, he discovers she appears attached to another guy at the pizza place she's working. He goes to a seafood place called The Flagship and gets drunk and when he's rude to Mary (Monica Raymund, Chicago Fire), the barmaid, he's thrown out and beaten up, then later robbed by Sal (Leo Woodall, Tuner), a worker in the kitchen. The owner, Chef (Antonio Banderas, Desperado), takes Tony home and puts him in the hammock on the porch of his small beach house.

Broke, Tony apologizes to Chef and begs for a job at Flagship and to keep sleeping on the hammock. Chef, believing Tony when he claims to have kitchen experience, brings him on as a dishwasher, eventually advancing him to oyster shucking and more all while continuing to wake him up with water dumped on him. While he's interested in the cooking stuff, Tony still sees himself as a writer and persists in lying to Nancy and himself as to what his destiny is.

It is to the credit of director/co-writer Matt Johnson (lasts seen starring and directing Nirvanna The Band The Song The Movie) in approaching this part of Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential memoir that he doesn't lay on too thick the idea that a lightning bolt struck Tony to make him realize cooking was going to be his path to becoming an author. It's just a summer in a confused young man's life where he's still sorting out who he even is when he's not fronting what he wishes he was. 

During my traditional post-biopic fact checking, I found it was fairly true to the fictionalized references in Kitchen Confidential, though in order to create a more dramatic impetus to the plot it fudged the fact that Tony and Nancy had already dated for a few years before their planned mutual trip to Provincetown and that they eventually married about a decade later before divorcing 20 years after that. Tony wasn't chasing no skirt, yo!

In my review of The Holdovers I faulted Sessa's performance as the weak link, presumably due it being his first film role. Well, in the intervening few years he's really stepped up his game because here he balances the competing impulses of Tony while hinting at his future without obviously mimicking Bourdain's distinct style. Well done. It's also good to see Antonio Banderas getting some room to work as Chef instead of being wasted as he was in last year's Babygirl. (In a meta bit of IYKYK casting, when Tony applies to the Culinary Institute of America at the end, the main instructor is played by chef Eric Ripert, Bourdain's bestie and traveling companion who got to find his friend's body.)

While small-scale and slightly fibby, Tony is a decent coming-of-age biopic about someone whose talents are sorely missed. (The missus was so angry at his suicide she got rid of all his books and avoids his shows.)

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"One Night Only" Review

Sometimes a movie's premise is so reminiscent of another film's premise that people coin alternate titles for it. Such is the case for One Night Only, a cute rom-com with the wild angle in that it's about a world where premarital sex is outlawed except for one 12-hour evening per year. Now you know what your friends were talking about if they talked about The Sex Purge.

Our target couple is Allie (Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown) who is a commercial jingle singer specializing in pharmaceutical ads where pop tunes have their lyrics changed to mention diseases and drugs to treat them, and Owen (Callum Turner, Eternity), a NYC pizza shop owner who plans to propose to his girlfriend, Malika (Maya Hawke, Stranger Things), that night. Unfortunately, Malika drops the bomb on him at dinner that she wants to use that night to bang some guy in their building using their apartment. Meanwhile, Allie's winggirl, Jacinta (singer King Princess), meets a guy in line for the bathroom as soon as they get to the bar and takes off with him leaving Allie alone. 

 Of course this means Allie and Owen will keep bumping into each other in a serious of meet-cutes while they pursue someone to serve as Mr./Ms. Right Now since Owen can't even go to his mother's (Molly Ringwald, Riverdale) house because she and her man (LeVar Burton, Roots) are getting their freak on there. So, it's an episodic sequence of misadventures for the two of them as they have to compete for the seeming last condom in Manhattan (safe sex is mandatory), get catfished by a robber on a dating app, have to flee from cops because their hookup is a thief and other hijinks that ensue.

Directed by Will Gluck (Easy A, Anyone But You) from a script by Travis Braun, making his screenwriting debut after creating a few children's TV show(?!), One Night Only somehow manages to skip right past the insane premise where everyone simply obeys the government and has electronic tattoos to control them to assemble a fairly good rom-com which makes the inevitable pairing of the leads seem in doubt for a few minutes. 

While the missus didn't care for Turner ("He's got Dumbo ears!" she sneered, a trait the movie notices as well), the real trick is having Barbero - who looks like a mashup of Lucy Hale and Drew Barrymore - running around in this minidress that was her lesbian roommate's ex-girlfriend's... 

...and look simultaneously look just kinda cute AND smoking hot while not attracting packs of men because every other girl on the streets that night look like supermodels.

I've seen rumblings from the terminally-aggrieved types complaining that the movie doesn't dig into the politics of a world where presumably uptight sex-negative killjoy Republicans have banned sex because they're no fun and ORANGE MAN BAD! (right, the thrice-married horndog whom they're still attaching mistresses to at 80 wants to ban sex /rolleyes) because that's what people go to movies for: a lecture.

Just as we've had movies where literally money is time (In Time) where going broke kills you or that all crime is decriminalized one night a year (The Purge series, duh), One Night Only has a just-go-with-it premise to set its boy/girl-meets-the-right-girl/boy tale atop. In other words, lighten up, Franceses/Francises. Is it odd that people chant, "F*ck the mandate!" while not rebelling against it by, you know, plooking on the other days of the year. Sure, but it's not going to keep me up all night; same as I don't worry about whether the janitors at Stark Industries are fulfilled in their custodial duties. It's a movie.

Perhaps the weird twist overly complicates some folks ability to consume One Night Only as the trifle it is, but if you're looking for a pleasant enough time and are eager to be enraged by a silly movie, it's worth your time.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Just Play Dead" Review

OK, I'm calling for the revocation of director Martin Campbell's filmmaking privileges. Just because he had some goodies like Casino Royale (with cheese!) and The Mask of Zorro in the past which keep getting held up in trailers as false promises of coming goodness in trailers, the fact his recent movies including Memory, Dirty Angels, and Cleaner (which I see I opened with this same rant) have been various breeds of dogs - his last decent movie I saw was 2017's The Foreigner (7/10, never finished the review) - and Just Play Dead is another mark in the bad column.

I'd never even heard of this thing and normally wouldn't have given it a look if not for the presence of Eva Green (who starred in Dirty Angels as well as Casino Royale and needs to tell her agent to stop taking Campbell's calls), but even those two factors aren't enough to advise anyone to suffer through this half-assed convoluted mess of a movie where I suspect everyone did it for the check and the location.

 Samuel L. Jackson co-stars as Jack Wolfe, a corrupt developer who's living the high life in the Canary Islands, funding his lifestyle by embezzling from the company. We meet him on his sailboat as he's poisoning a collaborator who is threatening to testify for the authorities. Even with this witness dead, he knows the law will ultimately catch up to him, so he hatches a scheme which he shares with his wife, Nora (Green).

He wants to fake his death, framing her current boy toy, Chad (Jason Fernández), who is even dumber than Pete Davidson's SNL namesake, for the murder, with the couple splitting the $30 million insurance payout. Also, lurking on the periphery is Dani (Eoin Macken), a cop Nora was banging a few weeks earlier and broke up with. He thinks Jack and Nora are up to something, but is too personally involved to keep from screwing the investigation up. Complicating matters is Nora seems to be trying to flip the script by actually having Chad kill Jack with the promise of riches and sweet Eva Green boobs as the enticement.

Having recently watched Body Heat, suffering through this whatever-the-Temu-version-of-Temu-would-be-wannabe-caper's convoluted plot is all the worse as endless yammering about plots and motivations make the 97-minute runtime feel much longer. The Wolfe's marriage is more a convenience - she owns 51% because spouses can't be forced to testify against each other - stemming from when she was an escort Jack offered to entertain clients until one got out of hand, leading to her shooting him in self-defense.

Jack talks about loving her, but they have zero chemistry and her catting around doesn't hint at much wifely loyalty. Green is also undercut by unflattering makeup and a dull wardrobe which made me wonder out loud whether she had another dress, they were so similar.

The only interesting and original detail was a older woman cop being referred to as "the Nun" who is revealed to also be an actual nun as well as a cop. Whut? And the supposedly whammy twist ending comes from out of nowhere and just seems like a bad joke. Speaking of which, what was the thinking behind running bloopers behind the end credits like it was The Cannonball Run, not a steamy erotic thriller it imagines it was.

Just Play Dead is best as advice to Martin Campbell's career.

Score: 2/10. Skip it. 

"Mayday" 4K Review

Apple TV is not immune from having so-so "movie show content" despite some prestigious "TV show content" and thus we have Mayday, the latest from writer-director tag team John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein whose last movie was the well-regarded but underseen Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (which I haven't gotten around to watching yet). Now they're taking on a Cold War period buddy action dramedy with Ryan Reynolds (Van Wilder) and Kenneth Branagh (lots of Shakespeare stuff) as a US pilot and former KGB agent, respectively.

It's 1987 and Reynolds' Naval Lt. Troy "Assassin" Kelly is assigned to an SR-71 spy mission over the Soviet Union after an opening sequence totally copied from Top Gun's opening. When the mission goes sideways resulting in the pilot being killed and Troy forced to eject behind enemy lines, injured when he lands in a forest, he is found and patched up by Nikolai "Call me Nik" Ustinov (Branagh), who has retired from the spy game and harbors a dark secret: He's fascinated by America, especially his favorite movie, a bootleg tape of Top Gun.

2000 kilometers from the closest border with Finland, his original suggestion is that Troy just stay with him until the Cold War ends, but that becomes really impractical when current KGB General Alexander Volkov (Marcin Dorociński, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One) arrives at Nik's isolated cabin searching for the surviving American pilot from the crash. While Nik manages to hide Troy well enough, he knows this was a temporary win so decides to help get Troy to the US Embassy in Moscow. He hopes that he and his estranged daughter, Anna (Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), will be able to defect and gain asylum as a reward for helping Troy escape.

What follows is your standard Odd Couple buddy road trip/action hybrid plot where Nik proves to be quite the badass fighter, taking out multiple opponents in bars, train cars, etc. But since this is a modern movie it gets laden with current Hollyweird ideological baggage that America is a malign entity against its own service people and in some ways no better than the Evil Empire and that "The best way to stand for your country is to stand up against it." Can't have America live up to Top Gun's image, now can we? Also, there's the obligatory LGB subplot to make Nik seem more progressive than the typical Ruskie.

While Reynolds turns in his usual Ryan Reynolds quippy performance, Branagh seems more committed to his bit as a complex man in a oppressive country where he was once the oppressor. Let's not kid ourselves, Mayday isn't remotely deep, but it is sporadically amusing when it's not trying to pontificate about America's ills.

Score: 5.5/10. Catch it on Apple TV.

"If These Walls Could Rock" Review

If These Walls Could Rock is a brisk documentary about the legendary Sunset Marquis hotel which was the scene of massive parties and debauchery committed by and reminisced about by a parade of stars including Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, Dave Grohl, Simon Le Bon, Roger Daltrey, Billy Gibbons, Nancy Wilson, Gene Simmons, Sheryl Crow, Cyndi Lauper, Slash, Richard Marx, and even Morrissey, who is interviewed in bed with a huge poster of X-Ray Spex signer Poly Styrene next to him.

Running parallel to the rock star antics is the relationship between the founder and builder of the Marquis, George Rosenthal, who opened it in 1963 in the area of the Playboy Club, right as rock & roll became the dominant cultural force, and his son Mark, whose nickname of Marky provided the hotel's name. Because George was both domineering yet inattentive, the hotel became increasingly run down in the Eighties and Nineties, but rockers who sought other accommodations in town often found their antics not appreciated like they were tolerated at the Marquis.

The hotel's general manager also relates how Green Day repeated got banned from the place only to come back a day after the ban's expiration to trash something else, earning another ban, rinse, repeat. While some of the stories are amusing like Keith Richards sauntering by the pool in a Speedo with a pack of smokes and a knife tucked in while holding a pina colada and a beer in both hands, a some of them are just dumb excesses.

As the place evolved, many stars set up residence there including the self-proclaimed Unofficial Mayor of the Sunset Marquis, Billy Bob Thornton, who tells of having sex on an outdoor stairs while a famous actor and his actress wife passed by and that he'll stay there for months despite having a 13,000+ sq. ft. home nearby.

The pace begins to lag in the last third as people clean up their acts and the clientele changes, but over 60 years later the Marquis is still absorbing stories within its walls.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"The Runner" Review

The latest loaf of movie content from Amazon Prime Video is The Runner, not to be confused with at least five prior movies with the same title. Starring Gal Gadot (Date Night) stars as Maia Marten, a London prosecutor with a diabetic son. After dropping him off at school, she sets off for a jog before meeting heading to court where a star witness is going to testify against a previously untouchable crime boss.

However, she receives a phone call from a voice that sounds like Jason Statham (Damian Lewis, Homeland) telling and showing her that he has her son, Noah (Rory Wilmot), has given him an extra dose of insulin to put him in a coma and if she doesn't murder the witness within one hour he will die unless glucagon is administered. He orders her to run to the hotel the witness is sequestered and shoot him with the gun he has placed in Noah's backpack and left in a dumpster as proof he has him as if the video call doesn't do as much.

So, off she goes encountering obstacles like being hit by a car and waking up in an ambulance still wearing her phone headset so she can hear the Caller. When she rides the subway (yeah, Underground, I'm American and we fought a war against England to have our own words) to make up lost time, her phone is pickpocketed and she somehow is able to run ahead to get back on the train. Whut? That's the kind of movie this is.

Also to fill time is the Caller taunting her about her life, how she used a sperm donor to have Noah (why is never explained), how her mother murdered her abusive father - or did she? - while goading her to the destination. They even work in that she was a champion pentathlon runner which includes shooting, but there wasn't a single twist that was unexpected and when they flashback at the end to show what really happened, it seems to be for those who were too busy on their phones to pay attention to the hyperkinetic camera and editing work.

There's been a recent uptick of bashing Gal Gadot for her limited thespian skills. (That means acting, not making out with chicks, weirdos.) In a world where Dakota Johnson exists, that's somewhat unfair. Critical Drinker's review really slammed her performance, but I found it wholly adequate. As a real-life mother of four (while fit enough to justify some gratuitous butt shots), she shows affection for her spawnling and seems appropriately sad and stressed. This role requires physical fitness more than anything and as I said, Dakota Johnson.

 Director Kevin Macdonald has a varied filmography including Touching the Void and The Last King of Scotland which won Forest Whitaker an Oscar, so this seems a little out of place but he keeps the action frenetic without devolving into Paul Greengrass shaky-cam and nausea-inducing edit fu.

 While The Runner is just another piece of content that will sink into the endless shelves of Prime Video's lousy UX and never be thought of again in a couple of weeks, if there's "nothing else to watch" then a brisk 80-minute (sans credits) jaunt of sweaty Gal Gadot is better than nothing, if barely. 

Score: 5/10. Catch it on Prime Video.