Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson Race a Liver Through Brisbane in 'Runner'
Alan Ritchson plays a war hero turned courier who must transport a donated liver across Brisbane while a drug lord's son tries to steal it. That is the premise of Runner, an action thriller from Angel Studios directed by Scott Waugh, reviewed by Variety on 9 September 2026.
Ritchson stars as Hank Malone, a year sober and learning French in memory of his late daughter. Owen Wilson co-stars as Ben Bishop, a talkative messenger charged with accompanying the donated organ on its journey from the United States to Australia. The liver is destined for a Gold Coast hospital, where a sick girl named Ellie — played by Scarlett Crabtree — is waiting. Her mother Kate is played by Leila George.
The stakes are doubled because the liver has a second claimant. Rodrigo Santoro plays Damian Zaldívar, the ruthless son of a drug lord portrayed by Cecilia Toussaint. Zaldívar's father also needs the liver to survive, which puts two desperate parties on a collision course over a single organ.
Ritchson also co-produces the film, his second credit behind the camera on a feature after building a following as the title character in Amazon's Reacher series. The screenplay is by Miles Hubley and Tommy White. The runtime is a lean 98 minutes. The teaser trailer first screened for industry attendees at CinemaCon 2026 in Las Vegas, as reported by Yahoo Entertainment in April 2026.
Angel Studios, the distributor behind the crowd-funded hit Sound of Freedom in 2023, continues to build a slate of action and thriller titles aimed at wide theatrical release. The studio's model relies on a community of backers who vote on which films to greenlight and then help market them through word-of-mouth campaigns. Runner fits that commercial mould: a high-concept premise, a recognisable cast, and a tight running time designed for maximum screen density.
The pairing of Ritchson and Wilson is an unusual one. Ritchson's screen presence is physical and taciturn; Wilson's trademark is a laconic, improvisational warmth. How those two registers sit together inside a single chase picture is the question the Variety review takes up — but whether the film delivers on its premise is a matter for critics, not the box office.
What the credits and production details make clear is a film engineered for speed. A 98-minute runtime, a single-city setting, one organ, two claimants. Waugh, whose previous directing credits include Need for Speed (2014) and Act of Valor (2012), has built his career on practical action and military-adjacent storytelling. The Brisbane and Gold Coast locations give the film a distinct visual backdrop — Australian urban and coastal geography standing in for a chase corridor that rarely appears in mainstream American action cinema.
The cast rounds out with Leila George, whose recent work includes Sean Penn's Flag Day (2021), and Rodrigo Santoro, a fixture of Brazilian and international cinema since his breakout in Love Actually (2003). For Ritchson, Runner is another step in a rapid transition from television leading man to feature producer-star; for Wilson, it is a return to the action-comedy territory he last mined in the Shanghai Noon films two decades ago.
