Move over, Oscar bait—Gal Gadot has delivered something far more baffling: a feature-length cinematic punishment masquerading as a thriller. In Amazon’s ‘The Runner,’ Gadot doesn’t just act; she endures. For 84 grueling minutes, the Wonder Woman star is sentenced to jog through the streets of London, bumping into pedestrians, stealing phones, and getting hit by cars, all while shouting at a wireless headset. It’s less a movie and more like a sadistic personal trainer’s revenge fantasy for cheating on a diet.

The plot, a hostage saga where a mysterious criminal (Damian Lewis) holds Gadot’s son, serves only as a flimsy excuse for this marathon of misery. Gadot’s lawyer character Maia is ordered to keep running, never walk, and avoid human contact. The result is a spectacle of unintentional comedy, with Gadot’s delivery of lines like ‘You perv! You freakin’ perv!’ reaching new heights of robotic absurdity. Critics whisper it feels less like a thriller and more like being held hostage by someone’s misguided passion project.

Behind the scenes, director Kevin Macdonald apparently had no feel for tension, instead slapping together cheap montages and random zooms on extras staring at their phones. The screenplay shakes its fist at modern technology with all the nuance of a cranky grandpa, while the drone shots and abrasive needle-drops make the whole affair look like a bizarre, over-saturated ad for psoriasis medication. It’s the kind of film you accidentally leave on, thinking it’s a commercial, only to realize you’ve committed to an entire feature.

Yet, for the right kind of hate-watcher, ‘The Runner’ is a perverse delight. Every minute brings a new collision, a fresh attempt at phone theft, or another ill-advised sprint across subway tracks. It’s the cinematic equivalent of watching someone play ‘Grand Theft Auto’ by just holding down the sprint button and plowing through NPCs. The sheer stamina of its idiocy is almost admirable. Gadot, no Tom Cruise in the screen-running department, lopes along with the determined grace of someone late for a bus, never once making cardio look compelling.

Amazon, which gave us the glorious trash-fire of ‘War of the Worlds’ last year, seems to have stumbled into a new niche: the prestige hate-watch. While ‘The Runner’ fails spectacularly at being tense or coherent, it succeeds wildly at being a goofy, sweat-drenched bucket hat of a movie—completely ineffective but oddly mesmerizing in its failure.