Gal Gadot’s The Runner has landed at 5th in Prime Video’s charts after arriving last week, and the response has been brutal. Reviews were universally damning, while the film is already being clipped and shared online for mockery.
At 41, Gadot is back in a role that puts her in motion as a jogger blackmailed into committing a murder to save her son, and the reaction has once again turned the part into a shorthand for her wider film career. Reviews of The Runner have not just scored the film poorly; they have pushed the performance itself into the centre of the discussion.
Kevin Macdonald in London
Kevin Macdonald, the filmmaker behind The Last King of Scotland and State of Play, directs the film, which is set in London. That gives The Runner a recognisable thriller frame, but the conversation around it has moved far beyond plot mechanics and into Gadot’s screen presence, the one element critics and viewers keep returning to.
Louis Chilton’s writing has made the reaction unusually blunt: “Run, Gal, run!” and “It’s hard to see a way back for Gadot at this point.” He also wrote that “she has become not just a bad actor, but an actor who is famously bad at acting,” a line that captures why this release is sticking online instead of fading after launch.
Damian Lewis dominates
Damian Lewis also appears in The Runner, and the film’s harshest twist is that Gadot is not even the only target. The piece says Lewis is in preposterous puppetmaster mode, which complicates the easy reading that the film is simply a one-person collapse; the whole production is being treated as a failure, just with her taking the loudest hit.
Three-second clips of Gadot’s line deliveries are already circulating as mockery, which is the worst possible afterlife for a streaming release because the jokes travel faster than the film itself. Gadot’s recent stretch now runs through Wonder Woman 1984, Justice League, Death on the Nile, Red Notice, Snow White and The Runner, and the article argues that she has been unable to land a decent film role since Wonder Woman in 2017.
Wonder Woman after 2017
That is the real business story here: a once-bankable lead is now being used as a punchline in 2026, and The Runner is giving that argument fresh fuel. Prime Video still has a film in its top five, but the chart position does not blunt the broader signal — the audience is watching, and much of what it is sharing is ridicule.
For Gadot, the immediate problem is not whether The Runner reached viewers; it did. The harder question is whether any future role can break the pattern that this release has reinforced, or whether her next part gets treated the same way: less as a movie event than as material for the next set of clips.
