Runner (2026) – A Movie Review

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Today I was diligent and did my sequel work from 8:30am to 11am so life is good and I have an easy assignment for a post today.  Camera Girl and I went out to the movies yesterday.  Of course, because we’re ancient we went to the 10:45 am showing and the theater on a Tuesday morning was virtually empty.  We went to see “Runner” with Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson.  Ritchson is the actor who plays Reacher in the Amazon series.  The plot has Ritchson as a courier who handles “special” deliveries.  He is supposed to deliver Owen Wilson and a transplant liver to a hospital where a little girl is on death’s door.  But there is also a drug cartel boss who wants the liver for his mother.  So, we get two hours of chase scenes, shootouts and fights culminating at the hospital where the little girl is waiting.  And it wouldn’t qualify as a spoiler if I tell you how it all ends.  But I won’t.

It was made by Angel Studios and I won’t say that it is a much lower quality than a big studio production but there’s a kind of “over the top” aspect to some of the scenes.  I would say generically, it’s an action/chase movie where the action is dialed up to eleven and stays there.  The fight scenes and the chase scenes go on and on seemingly for the whole movie.  So, if you have a limited tolerance for these scenes this will strain your patience.  As far as the acting, Ritchson does a workmanlike job of his part which is quite similar to the Reacher character.  Owen Wilson plays his usual Owen Wilson persona.  Meaning he’s a quirky affable, loquacious man who drives Ritchson’s strong, silent character insane with his endless banter.  The bad guys are everything you would want for the cartoon villains and cars, trucks and anything available is crashed, burned or blown up as needed.

Alright, I’ve said enough.  This movie is a silly action/adventure/comedy/buddy movie.  Does it work?  Mostly.  Would I recommend it?  Well, I’d have to qualify if by saying if you like Owen Wilson and you like watching Alan Ritchson doing his incredible hulk imitation then yes, you’ll enjoy this.  If you’re a big fan of action movies you also might like it.  Otherwise maybe it might be too over the top for you.

The Great Shirking Has Begun!

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So, the promotion is done.  And the results are very encouraging.  There’s been an uptick in all three types of orders; paperbacks, e-books and Kindle Unlimited pages.  In fact, today I’ve had all three types of sales and another two five-star ratings showed up so a very good way to end the promotion and the Based Book Sale.  Bravo!

But now the real work begins.  I’ve got to go forward with outlining and writing the next book.  And to do that correctly I have to (as my father used to say) “buckle down.”  I need to devote several hours every day to writing.  And those have to be early in the morning when my mind isn’t yet reduced to the soupy mush it will become by later in the day.  And so that means something’s gotta give.  And that something will have to be my daily posts.

Some days I’ll be a ball of fire.  I’ll bang out page after page of deathless prose, take care of the chores at the Compound, grovel and genuflect to First Selectman Cthulhu and still manage to write a post.  But not always.  Some days I’ll put a song up instead.  Or maybe nothing at all.  I’ll try to keep up with the photos and quotes.  That shouldn’t overwhelm me.  But trying to produce five hundred coherent words on a topic that might interest the folks on the site is going to be beyond my powers of concentration for the foreseeable future.  I’m putting this out there to let everybody know how it is.

For most of you this won’t be a great hardship.  My mental powers have greatly diminished over the decade and more that I’ve been producing this blog and it may actually be a relief to know the ordeal is over.  But for me it’s kind of sad.  I’ve tried to be as reliable as I could be to the task.  But at the same time, I’ve got a strong desire to make this next book something special so I need to concentrate on quality and I need to finish it sooner than later because the longer I wait the fewer people who read the first book will be anxious to buy the sequel.

So, there you go.  I’m announcing the official “Shirking of OCF.”  I am AWOL and no power in the ‘verse can stop me.  I will understand if everyone deletes the web address and heads for greener pastures but I just want to add it’s been great talking to all you folks over the years and feel free to stop by whenever you feel like just in case I manage to produce readable text on that particular day.

Hasta la vista baby!

That Has Such Movies In’t

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What is called artificial intelligence or more specifically LLMs (Large Language Models) that can generate images and even video directly from text (Generative AI) is one of the most exciting technologies to emerge from the whole AI surge.  I have seen examples of video that looks as good as anything Hollywood creates with a mix of live action and CGI.  Which I guess isn’t surprising in one sense since this Generative AI, basically, is just another name for CGI.  But what is amazing to me is that what formerly was a technology that tech companies sold to movie studios for millions of dollars is now at the beck and call of anyone with access to ChatGPT.

And honestly, I can’t claim to know just how usable these AI videos are from a commercial point of view.  Could someone with a reasonable understanding of movie-making produce something that people would pay money to stream?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But what is fascinating is that I believe it’s already starting to happen.  Recently several movies have gotten into the theaters that weren’t produced by Hollywood.  Several YouTube “influencers” have parlayed their eight-figure viewing audiences into a multi-million-dollar box office payday by producing their own movies.  Now granted, these forays into independent cinema haven’t been particularly dependent on Generative AI.  Just the opposite.  The two most popular examples I can think of used almost nothing but “practical effects.”

But recently several completely AI generated movies have been exhibited at major film festivals and even streamed on Amazon.  Now none of these have made any appreciable money.  But that may be because the movies suck as stories.  After all, Disney has proven that you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a CGI masterpiece and still produce a story so stupid that no one wants to see it.  But the point is if you are at all tech savvy you can now make a short sci-fi movie that looks as good as Hollywood for between $500 to $5,000.  That is earth-shaking.

To me that means we are less than a couple of years until we will see tiny studios making movies that are good enough to see in a theater but have no gate-keepers whatsoever between the creators and the audience.  That is a startling thing.  Some young version of Stanley Kubrick will make his version of 2001: A Space Odyssey in his basement with the help of a “film crew” of less than a dozen people.  He’ll make a masterpiece for about $20,000 and it will make a billion dollars and an earthquake will swallow up Hollywood completely.  Think of it, all of the bloated, studio budgets and absurd rules that dictate which and how many DEI hires have to be directors, actors and producers will disappear overnight and some much saner award will be handed out for the movie that gets the most views and the highest viewer ratings.

Well, anyway, that’s the dream.  How it really turns out will be interesting.  Amazon, Netflix and the rest of the streaming services will be the ones to harness the new creators that will appear along with these new video tools.  But they’re not entrenched in the old studio systems, at least not to the degree that Hollywood is.  I think they’ll see opportunities aplenty in nurturing independent studios; at least after some of them produce stories people want to see.  And that’s already happening.  “O brave new world, / That has such movies in’t!”

 

15SEP2026 – Quote of the Day

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In the first place, it is not improper to observe, that the law of cases of necessity is not likely to be well furnished with precise rules; necessity creates the law, it supersedes rules; and whatever is reasonable and just in such cases, is likewise legal; it is not to be considered as matter of surprise, therefore, if much instituted rule is not to be found on such subjects.

William Scott