The ‘runner’ of the title is essentially a glorified delivery man. Except that Hank (Alan Ritchson) isn’t delivering pizzas, burgers or somebody’s Amazon order. He’s transporting human organs for transplant, which means that if the package doesn’t arrive on time, somebody dies.

And in ‘Runner’, that somebody is a young girl waiting in hospital for a liver.

It’s a wonderfully simple premise for a thriller because the stakes are established immediately. Hank has to get from A to B, the clock is ticking and there is something in the back of his vehicle that is literally a matter of life and death.

Unfortunately, somebody else wants it. A gang leader’s mother is dying and needs the same precious organ, which means Hank’s apparently straightforward delivery rapidly turns into an extended battle to make sure the liver reaches its intended recipient.

At which point I found myself wondering: why isn’t Jason Statham in this, because this is surely the most Jason Statham film that Jason Statham never made. Instead we have Alan Ritchson as Hank, who even comes equipped with the kind of backstory that could have been designed specifically for Statham. He has a military past. He knows how to handle himself. He doesn’t particularly want trouble, but when trouble arrives, he’s exceptionally well equipped to deal with it.

And trouble most certainly arrives. There’s a great line in which Hank explains, ‘I’m not a man that people successfully mess with.’

He’s not exaggerating. What follows is total carnage, with shootings, stabbings, fights and a considerable body count as various people attempt to separate Hank from his increasingly valuable cargo.

Yet Hank himself isn’t presented as someone who particularly wants to return to violence. He has tried to leave that part of his life behind. He carries considerable emotional baggage of his own, having lost his daughter years earlier. His marriage has collapsed, he’s divorced, and he has struggled with alcohol.

So inevitably this isn’t simply another job. Saving the girl waiting for that liver becomes, in some sense, a way of saving himself.

There is something very familiar about that structure – the damaged action hero who gets one final opportunity to do something unquestionably worthwhile – but ‘Runner’ doesn’t pretend to be reinventing the genre. This is a high-octane chase thriller and it knows exactly what sort of film it wants to be.

What gives it a little more personality is Owen Wilson. He plays the courier accompanying Hank on the journey, and the relationship between the two men reminded me at times of Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin in ‘Midnight Run’. You have one man who is relatively taciturn and would probably prefer to complete the journey without unnecessary conversation, alongside another who is considerably more talkative.

Crucially, that contrast works. But, like any decent road movie, the journey gradually reveals that not everybody is telling the whole truth, but the film never strays very far from its central ticking clock. Indeed, that simplicity is probably the film’s greatest strength. It gives all the violence a clear objective.

There’s an obvious redemption narrative at work. Hank is a man whose life has been shaped by loss, guilt and self-destruction, and suddenly he is given a job in which failure will result in another parent losing a child.

The difference is that redemption here isn’t achieved through words. It’s achieved through driving very fast and beating up an extraordinary number of people. This is, after all, an action movie.

And ‘Runner’ is extremely violent. The film may give Hank emotional trauma and a reluctance to return to his old ways, but once push comes to shove, it doesn’t exactly hold back. People are shot, stabbed and dispatched with considerable efficiency.

In another film, you might question whether quite so many people really need to die in order to save one life. Here, that’s somewhat beside the point.

And providing an unexpectedly attractive backdrop to all this carnage is Australia’s Gold Coast, which looks beautiful even while people are being shot and stabbed all over it.

Yes, this is a film that is violent, familiar and completely over the top. But sometimes that’s exactly what you want from this kind of thriller.