Gal Gadot has the worst-reviewed film of her career and the most-watched movie on Prime Video, at the same time.
movie review
Gal Gadot's The Runner Tops Prime Video in 38 Countries Despite Brutal Reviews
Critics gave Gal Gadot's new thriller the worst score of her career. Viewers pushed it to No. 1 on Prime Video in 38 countries anyway.
In "The Runner," an 84-minute real-time thriller directed by Kevin Macdonald, Gadot plays Maia Marten, a London prosecutor sent racing across the city on a caller's instructions after her son is abducted, opposite Damian Lewis and Alfred Enoch.
It landed on Prime Video on September 2. and was immediately buried by critics. It holds a Tomatometer score in single digits, drawn from about 35 reviews of which only three are positive, the lowest of Gadot's career. Nick Schager called it migraine cinema. Others picked apart a kidnapping plot that they said falls apart on contact with logic.
Viewers went a different way. By September 4 the film was the number one movie on Prime Video in 38 countries including the United States, trending in more than 50, according to FlixPatrol tracking. Its audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, while still negative, has run consistently above the critics' figure as ratings accumulated.
That gap is familiar territory for Gadot. "Red Notice" drew a 36 percent critics' score in 2021 and went on to become the most-viewed Netflix original film for four years. "Heart of Stone" was panned and pulled close to 110 million views. Audiences and critics have been keeping separate books on her for a decade.
What is new is the pressure around the production itself. Filming in London through the spring of 2025 was repeatedly disrupted by protesters, and eight were arrested across April and May. The Metropolitan Police said in a statement at the time that demonstrators had targeted the shoot "solely because an actress involved in the production is Israeli." Prosecutors discontinued the case and dropped all charges in November 2025. Separately, Lebanon barred Disney's "Snow White" from its cinemas last year because Gadot is on the country's Israel boycott list, a policy that has kept her films out of the country entirely.
Gadot has not backed away from any of it. She has spoken publicly about the volume of hostility she encountered after October 7 and has urged other Jews in the industry to speak up rather than stay quiet.
The critics' will tell you "The Runner" is a bad film. 38 countries' worth of viewers will tell you the opposite.
