Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson team up in Gold Coast action movie Runner

Runner is something of a rarity when it comes to locally-made action movies: not only was it filmed on the Gold Coast, it is actually set on the Gold Coast. No playing spot the local landmark as you’re being told events are taking place in some unnamed America city – what you see it what you get, even if the body count does seem a little high even for Queensland.

The implausibly named Hank Malone (Alan Ritchson) is a former US military veteran now working in Queensland as a ‘Runner’ – someone who drives around transporting dubious or high-value items and solving problems along the way. You know, exactly like a transporter in those Jason Statham movies with Transporter in the title. Only without the fancy suit, and his car is a bit more low-rent as well.

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In an early sign that this movie is going to be a cut above the usual for locally-made action, we do not get a clumsy lump of exposition explaining his backstory early on. There are a few hints – a photo of his daughter, an AA chip – but the focus is more on his daily work, which seems to mostly involve an annoying voice on the phone telling him where to go.

Running a few quick jobs around town

Turns out there’s a lot of work in the Brisbane-Gold Coast area for a big burly guy, including sorting out a drunken politician and carrying an extremely valuable bird between a separated couple (neither of them want it, which becomes important later). But the day’s big job is a rush job: there’s a liver flying into the country that can save a young girl’s life.

Escorting the liver is Ben Bishop (Owen Wilson), who is pretty much the exact opposite of Malone. He’s chatty, outgoing, a people person. Clearly they’re not going to get along, but as it’s a short trip to the hospital where the girl is waiting for the life-saving transplant, that shouldn’t be much of a problem.

Well, aside from some minor confusion as to exactly where they’re meant to be going. Which is quickly followed by the reveal that Malone’s boss sold him out to a bunch of Cartel criminals and local bikies led by Damian Zaldívar (Rodrigo Santoro). Is Malone the kind of guy who’d let a little girl die, especially after losing his own daughter? Let the gunplay begin!

Watch the trailer

A few Australian extras

The story in a genre film is basically just a way to deliver the moments the audience have come to see. That doesn’t mean the story doesn’t matter, just that it’s more like the foundation for the entertainment than the actual entertainment itself. The story here is pretty basic, but it’s a solid foundation; you can poke holes in it if you want to, but it gets the job done.

Likewise, Ritchson is a decent action performer who can sell his character’s (limited) emotional moments while convincingly taking care of a dozen or more bad guys in entertainingly brutal fashion. He hasn’t yet come up with the extra element a decent action actor needs to be really memorable – Jason Statham is funny, Arnold Schwarzenegger is arrogant, Scott Adkins is an underdog, and so on – but here, he’s got Owen Wilson for that.

Wilson threatens to be annoying at first but gradually settles down to become a likable sidekick, while Santoro is way over-the-top and thus perfect for his role. The Australians in the cast are mostly in smaller roles, including the doctors and nurses at the hospital (including Kate Box, Peta Sergeant and Leila George as the mum).

That said, Malone does say some nice things about Brisbane and Australians in general. (He can tell the bad guy isn’t from around here because he’s an arsehole and the Australians that he’s met have been nice.) Plus there are a few tourism shots showing off the Brisbane skyline so it kind of balances out.

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Delivering the action

The action is what you’ve come to see and for the most part it’s good stuff. Runner is the kind of film that’s smart enough to know that a good joke can be more effective than seeing some faces get pummelled for the fifth time in a row, so it’s not afraid to mix things up a little while still delivering the basic meat & potatoes fight scenes where Malone takes apart chumps with brutal efficiency.

There’s a scene around the middle of the film where Malone gets grabbed by the bad guys and thrown in the back of a blacked-out SUV. The car starts to drive off then stops, rocks back and forth with the windows smashing out, then Malone gets out on his own and moves onto beating up the next wave of bad guys. It’s not a classic moment, but it’s the kind of scene that separates an entertaining action film from just a collection of repetitive fights.

More importantly, director Scott Waugh (working from a script by Miles Hubley and Tommy White) keeps things escalating steadily. By the end not only have we had a lot of liver-related drama, but a thrilling car chase sequence (featuring, at one stage, a Gold Coast tram) with a number of pretty nasty deaths, and a brutal final one-on-one fight that seemingly destroys half of a major hospital – all in just over 90 minutes.

This is nobody’s idea of high art, but it does feature a scene where the spinning back wheel of an upside down police car is used to send a bad guy flying face-first into a wall. Sometimes that’s all you want from a film.

Runner is in Australian cinemas now.

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