Runaway Train

Having seen "Unstoppable," I had to see this.

It is hard to know what influence Kurosawa had on this, but one can guess. He had been through his rejection in Japan, suicide attempt and film made and financed by the Soviets. He subsequently arranged scant funding for this, started and was foiled. What we have now is supposedly completely reworked. But what we see is Soviet iconography in the trains and snow, and Shakespearean motion toward tragedy. (Kurosawa would do the Shakespearean "Ran" instead of this, and we are lucky for that.)

So this comment will not be on the acting, though Voight is not only superb, but inhabits the character as we fear we would. It is about the icons and the camera. I think we have inherited this from Akira.

The trains have been painted to be big flat black hulks, reshaped with plywood to resemble Soviet machines. We have a Soviet director. Early in the film, we have that train (four locomotives) hit the end of another, demolishing it. In the process, the front of our beast is turned into a ragged tear of heavy metal, racing madly through heavy snow, angry at the weather.

"Unstoppable" takes a few scenes from this: the hitting of the end of another train; the bridge that has the fatal speed limit; the "soldier" lowered from a chopper then pummeled. But it is an altogether different film. Scott is all about energy in the camera. Every scene moves in a dance that is composed. The rhythm and energy is in our eye. He works to give is narrative stances for that eye: TeeVee cameras, characters that are observers and others that comment on observation.

The train is only a prop, the characters only something to carry the narrative thrust. The art is in the eye, on our side of the wall.

This film has three animals: Voight's character, a convict driven to heroic madness, the opposing warden who is every bit as demented and colorful. Both of these are runaway trains, bested by the train itself which has agency of its own. It seems to have killed and ejected the engineer, enticed two convicts aboard, then gone mad, attracting the warden as well. It is "imprisoned" in a braid of rails, designed here to relate to the train as the remarkable prison building is to the humans.

All the cameras are static except the ones following the train, some of which race through the woods the same way we saw in "Rashoman."

It seems that like with "Star Wars," Kurosawa can bless a film by merely breathing on it.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

I don't think I could dislike the movie that gave us both Machete and Zeus.

In all seriousness though, Runaway Train might just be the best film to come out from the crap-factory known as Cannon Group. Unsurprisingly this gem is based on a script by someone head and shoulders above the pack, this being here Akira Kurosawa. But no man is an island, and it takes considerably more than a script to make a movie. Jon Voight and Eric Roberts might provide the best performances I've seen from either one in a chilling setting that beautifully emphasizes the desperation of the characters in both their current predicament and life in general.

In addition to compelling cinematography, this Cannon film also surprises the viewer with yet another aspect sorely missing in many of their films: character development. This films grips the viewer on so many fronts and doesn't let go. The Runaway Train might be without a driver, but the film about it very much in control of its own fate, from beginning to end. I was pleasantly surprised by the way the movie almost poetically wraps itself done before the credits roll like any properly told story should.

It saddens me to realize how often overlooked this movie is. Before the Cannon Group documentary Electric Boogaloo I don't remember any mention of it, even though I've scanned quite some of their catalogue in search of "so bad it's good" b-movies (and boy, do they deliver that in a steaming pile!)

However, Runaway Train is in a completely different category, and despite some minor flaws I do heartily recommend it to anyone even vaguely interested in it. Such poetry in film never comes too often to our screens, so it should be savoured at every chance.

RUNAWAY TRAIN is one of only a few films which are so great that you'll like the people involved in it for the rest of their career regardless in which movies they appear in the future. Walter Hill's underrated STREETS OF FIRE did this to Willem Dafoe, Diane Lane and even Michael Pare while RUNAWAY TRAIN did the same to John Voight, Rebecca DeMornay and even Eric Roberts.

I find it interesting that a film written by a Japanese (Akira Kurosawa!) and directed by a Russian (Andrej Konchalowsky) which features American actors can be such a coherent masterpiece. Although the story is very simple there are deeper layers of meaning which have a lot to say about the human condition and which are so universal that everyone can read the metaphors. Truly an existential action-film!

RUNAWAY TRAIN is not only one of my favorite action-movies of all times but one of the greatest films ever in my opinion. And the famous "gold"-monologue by Manny is just so true!

Everything about this film has a surreal, visceral, in-your-face quality; the anguished, violent intensity of the prison scenes, the frozen wastelands of the lands outside the prison (gee, a metaphor?), the train -- not just a lifeless machine but a huge, juggernaut-like beast -- that the title refers to, the fierce, animalistic performance by Jon Voight, who plays the character of Manny with such raw emotion and conviction that at no moment do we doubt that he is anything other than what he appears to be on screen.

It's based on a screenplay by the legendary Akira Kurosawa -- knowing this makes a lot of the elements a bit more familiar; the snow, the hopelessness, the apocalyptic atmosphere -- and it's directed by Russian Andrei Konchalovsky, who after this film directed two Hollywood embarrassments called "Homer & Eddie" and "Tango & Cash" (apparently trying to corner the market on ampersands), and most recently helmed the acclaimed Armand Assante mini-series "The Odyssey" for television. "Runaway Train" is not a perfect film, some of the minor supporting performances are really awful and some viewers may find Eric Roberts to be irritating, but the sheer kineticism, among the other stronger elements, makes it worthwhile. Often called an intellectual action picture, it's more of an existential one, i.e. man versus a indifferent/hostile universe, etc. Everything in the film has a greater, more universal meaning, and it's not rocket science to figure out what stands for what. The simplicity of its metaphors doesn't dull the impact of "Runaway Train" as a sensory experience, though, because it's still pretty potent stuff. Provided you're not completely close-minded, this is one you'll remember for a long, long time.

The stock title promises action and suspense, and we get that, but with a story by Akira Kurosawa, expert direction by Russian émigré Andrei Konchalovsky and superior lensing by Alan Hume, we get a study of what defines a man.

John Voight and the vastly underrated Eric Roberts play two cons who escape from a hellish gulag and board a train with no driver. Their struggle to stop the train and battle their own inner demons is the movie.

Konchalovsky creates a cold, alien, ethereal world inside the train that, in the oddest way, provides a haven for self-examination for the two leads. Rebecca de Mournay is layered into the mix, as is the indefatigable John P. Ryan as a prison warden who risks death to return his charges to custody, but the movie belongs to Voight and Roberts who both bring tremendous humanity to their finely sketched characters.

The final image is as powerful as cinema gets and marks RUNAWAY TRAIN as a modest masterpiece.

Though often criticized for producing cheap rubbish, the Cannon Group, in fact, also produced many fine films including this, 52 PICK-UP and MARIA'S LOVERS (also Konchalovsky).