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Spoilers ahead for Amazon’s The Runner.
The streaming war has been going on for years now, and those with an Amazon Prime subscription were recently treated to Kevin Macdonald’s The Runner. Gal Gadot spends basically the whole movie running, but her character Maia is secretly formulating a plan to try and dupe Damian Lewis’ mysterious Caller and save her son. And the director spoke to CinemaBlend about how he set up the movie’s epic conclusion.
The Runner was on the list of upcoming action movies before dropping on streaming this week, and the movie’s finale is super satisfying. Namely because see that little move Maia made throughout its 84-minute runtime was setting up her master plan. As you can see in the above video, I asked Macdonald about this unique task, and he told me:
Although Gal is running the whole movie, she is hatching a plan as to how to get herself out of this situation and rescue her child who’s been kidnapped. There are little clues along the way that you probably weren’t on the first viewing notice, but you might think, ‘Huh, that’s a bit odd.’ But then you’re so quickly into the next moment, the next scene, and it’s so propulsive.
During the montage where Maia’s plan comes together, suddenly a bunch of moments in the movie make much more sense. So when we briefly saw her with a tube of lipstick, she was actually writing instructions for London bystanders. And when it looked strange as she loaded her gun in the elevator, that’s because the blue clip was actually full of blanks.
I loved seeing it all come together in The Runner‘s third act, which is why I had to ask Kevin Macdonald about the methodical way he shot and edited in the various hints. The Whitney filmmaker went on to tell me:
But then at the end, you realize it all comes together and all those little seeds that you’ve seen, hopefully the audience go, ‘Aha.’ Because the challenge is you need to have enough of those little clues along the way and have people notice them just enough without noticing too much, without giving away too much. So it was a constant balance.
While The Runner is releasing at the same time as Alan Ritchson’s Runner, smart money says that their third acts are going to play out very differently. Gal Gadot‘s new movie is a quick and easy watch from home, and its ending offers a big payoff, especially for those who have been watching the new Amazon flick closely.
As Macdonald went on to share, finding the right amount of shot to set up The Runner‘s big finale was a bit of a process. He shared more about what it took to land the plane, telling me:
A few more frames here, a little more here, a close up there. So it’s a very, kind of clockwork-like process actually of kind of really having to get into the kind of frame by frame of it.
Personally, I thought that this hard work paid off, and that the conclusion of the new Gal Gadot movie sticks the landing. And now that The Runner is available for everyone with a Prime Video subscription, we’ll have to see if audiences agree.
The Runner is streaming now on Amazon as part of the 2026 movie release list. Gal Gadot has yet another action-heavy movie under her belt, and this one pushed her to the limit physically.