The star is generally too easy a target when you’re looking for the ways a movie goes wrong.

So if we’re cutting Gal Gadot any slack at all for the debacle that “The Runner” turned out to be, let’s zero in on screenwriter Mark Gibson, who scripted um, “Snow Dogs,” the animated also-ran “The Wild” and nothing of any note at all starring flesh and blood humans.

Director and Bob Marley-fan pal Kevin Macdonald did “The Last King of Scotland,” “The Mauritanian” and terrific documentaries about Marley, Whitney Houston and others. If this pavement-pounding piffle has any pace or pulse at all, credit him.

Gadot? She stars as a dogged prosecutor and single mom whose son is kidnapped to coerce her into killing her star witness at a big mob trial.

She’s convincing as a lithe, athletic jogger who finishes off every phone call with “I’ve gotta run.” We can believe she’d be a willing trigger-woman.

But as a mother desperate to save her child, she’s about as empathetic as a shark. More to the point, whatever compelling touches the screenplay adds to the character — thinly-fictionalized touches of Charlize Theron’s real life background — Gadot fails on most every level in making her or her plight all that interesting.

Maia drops her clingy son (Rory Wilmot) off at his London school on the opening day of her big trial prosecuting a London mob leader for murder. Then she’s off on her morning run.

She and the viewer are utterly beaten about the ears with a parade of digitally-distracted pedestrians, bystanders, drivers and passengers, conversing on phones, swapping sexy texts, doom scrolling or distracting themselves with TikTok.

That’s the big subtext of the movie, our “devices” have disconnected us. Yawn.

A lawyer lady can’t even run with her Bluetooth ear buds without getting scam calls telling her she’s “already won.”

But one caller isn’t is scammer with a South Asian accent. “I have your son,” he purrs. Apparently, her fraidy-cat kid just wandered off with the first strange man (Damien Lewis, “Band of Brothers”) to offer him ice cream.

“Just think of me as a force for change.”

What she has to do to free her diabetic child is run across town to the hotel where Scotland Yard is guarding her star witness, take a gun the kidnapper’s put in her son’s backpack — which he hid in a dumpster — and gun down the mob turncoat.

The mostly-unseen stranger (we can see Lewis’s chin and hear his distinct voice), with the cliched world-of-tech screens and gadgets at EveryVillain’s disposal, knows all about competitive, can-do “killer” Maia. He can control her phone, AI mimic her voice to ward off work and school calls, and deep dive into her bikini or underwear-clad laptop photos just to show he means business.

What CAN Maia do, on the run through parks, crowded streets, along the river and canals, into The Tube, unable to call or even accost cops or strangers with her plight as our kidnapper keeps her line open and hears and tracks her every move.

Gadot’s Maiia will steal a cell phone — several — in an effort to reach out for help. She’ll outrun owners of various ages, have her own phone stolen, get violent and be chased by London’s finest for that.

The picture does a piss-poor job of maintaining the “ticking clock” element of this ticking clock thriller. The child in jeopardy is an underdeveloped plot point, as diabetic shock and diabetic coma are introduced and underplayed.

But the real failing here is in getting across our heroine’s breathless desperation and letting us follow along as she works the problem. The first is Gadot’s failing, and the second a scripted shortcoming that the director doesn’t fix.

It’s a bold thriller these days that allows a kid or the parent trying to save them die. Suffice it to say “bold” doesn’t figure in here. Showing us the far-fetched “solutions” to how what happens happens after the fact is always a cheat, and it isn’t well-handled here. At all.

“The Runner” might have merited a theatrical release, at least in someone’s eyes, at some point in the production process. But this script needed work, and if Ana de Armas or Leticia Wright weren’t available, plainly they should have kept casting until they found somebody with the warmth and mania necessary to convey a mother’s love for and then panic over the kidnapping of her darling boy.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Gal Gadot, Damien Lewis, Rory Wilmot and Alfred Enoch

Credits: Directed by Kevin Macdonald, scripted by Mark Gibson. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:25