Final Run

Robert Urich was a perfectly good actor but one who rarely got roles that stretched him and he spent most of his career doing this type of TVM triviality It is a disaster movie scenario with the newest,safest train around going haywire when its "pilot"spills liquid over the computer which controls the running of the vehicle amd sends it hurtling out of control ,Unless Urich can save the day passengers and maybe patients in a local hospital are going to perish. Urich ,naturall ,has domestic problems as well with his son estranged from his stepmother .Add to the brew a pompous Senator,a heart attack victim and some personable crew members neeed ing to step up to the plate and you have the ingredients for a dreadfully familiar picture

Some striking British Columbia scenery and an okay climax lift things a bit but as was so often the case Urich deseved better. Mediocre.

This is one of the funniest travel-catastrophe movies I've seen... pity it was meant to be serious!

As soon as the so-called engineer spilled his cup of water into the computer system, I knew it was going to be a stupid movie.

This engineer didn't even know what to do to bypass the computer and was frantically searching through the manual, which he obviously had never read before... some training! (No pun intended.)

The only thing missing from this crappy, ground-based 'Airport' was the elderly stowaway and the nun. We had the pompous politician, the emergency heart attack, the driver (pilot) who fell off the train (really!) and so on...

If you have a choice to see this movie or watch paint dry... go for the paint!

I won't repeat the vast list of technical errors and impossibilities that the previous commentators made, I think we all spotted them for ourselves. My comment is in a different direction.

I frequently have issues with commentators who concentrate on technical errors in movies. I think that often they have missed the point. In this movie, however, such commentary is entirely relevant. Here, the entire movie is about (correction, is SUPPOSED to be about) the "technics" of a modern computerised train gone wrong. Thus, in my opinion, in a movie like this, the movie makers have an obligation (to their own credibility, if nothing else) to get the technical details right, because in theory, that's what their movie is trying to show! If they don't, they suffer the consequences: as so many of the other commentators said, the movie becomes a spoof of itself.

Also, and I'm a bit surprised that no-one else has picked up this point, I would have thought that by 1999 we would have gotten past the cliche of "infallible computer fails". Or was this some kind of twisted pre-Y2K hype?

And they're ALL on board Americana Rail's crack Grand Royale: the Disposable Engineer, the Cute Little Kid, the Arrogant Politician, the Sick Passenger (who needs immediate help), the New Stepmom (who just wants to fit in), the Ex-Quarterback-who-lost-the-Big-Game (but who gets a new chance to save the day), and... the Unlikely Hero! What I mean is, they've already parodied this sort of film in the "Airplane" series and "The Big Bus". Still, this could have been done very well; but there are so many distracting factual errors that we keep getting thrown off....the track. Railroad disaster dramas are hard to pull off, anyway; trains go, or they don't. So they made this one hard to stop, with so many goofy reasons for it that railroaders will be rolling in laughter. (That schtick was tried in 1973's "Runaway", with the same results.) It's not all bad; there is some great British Columbia rail photography to be seen, and the interior scenes are done well. But when the plot says the Grand Royale is doing over 80, we can see it's obviously more like 25 at best, even with the tricky camera angles that are used. Stuff like that is just carelessness. A pity; I wanted to like this movie.

Every trite cliche, every sub-plot imaginable, combine to make this the most awful piece of trash I have ever seen. From stepmother/step son conflict to failed athlete to obnoxious Washington politico(is there any other) a hodge-podge of garbage.