Runaway

Okay this movie is far from perfect. However, on a rainy day, or lazy weekend afternoon the movie is highly enjoyable.

Like a lot of movies it starts out great but gets a little silly towards the end.

What makes this movie is Tom Selleck. He is a very under-appreciated actor, who always seems to breathe life into the dullest of movies. Here he takes what could of been a much sillier movie and brings a lot of believability to his role and to the story. Even if it is about robots going nuts.

Michael Crichton directed this one, strange that he didn't write it as a book first, cause it is a great story. A little ahead of it's time which might explain it's poor performance with the critics and at the box office.

Definitely worth checking out. Great Jerry Goldsmith score.

Unjustly maligned science fiction action flick from the 80s, that greatest of decades, written and directed by Michael Crichton. Tom Selleck stars and it's probably his best film role. He's believable and likable here. Cynthia Rhodes and Kirstie Alley both are good in their parts. For years before I ever finally saw this I assumed Alley was the female lead but she's definitely not. For his part Gene Simmons is a great campy villain.

The best parts of the movie are the robots that are charmingly old-fashioned looking yet more realistic, especially with the technology available at the time, than any of the limber acrobatic humanoid CGI robots that we see in films today. These robots are machines built for practical purposes not as nerd action fantasy objects. I'm not sure why this movie gets as much grief as it does. I think it's an underrated little gem that's definitely worth a look.

The beauty of "Runaway" - . . . well, there are a few, actually. It's a good marriage of cop movie and plausible science fiction, a nasty villain (Gene Simmons with that creepy stare) and it works pretty much as well now as it did 30 years ago - which is something when we're talking a movie that's as unabashedly '80s as this. Selleck and Rhodes (hello!) have a good rapport, and the car "chase" scene on the freeway was pretty well don. On second thought, this probably shouldn't be as watchable as it is, but then again, Crichton actually manages to wring some nice suspense out of tiny robots.

7/10

A robotics division of the police force was created to deal with "runaways." Those would be robots that have gone haywire and need to be fixed or shutdown. Why that would fall under the police's jurisdiction is beyond me. I would think that the Geek Squad would be more suited for that job.

At any rate, when a mysterious computer chip is found in a runaway and a man is killed by a bullet that acted more like a guided missile, Jack Ramsay (Tom Selleck) uncovers a sinister plot.

This movie is not too far from reality. I don't ever see the police force getting a robotics division but check out what was in the movie that is now normal: floater cameras (known as drones today), robots doing all kinds of jobs, smart devices, and chipped bullets (OK, that's not normal but I could see that happening).

Like so many movies about technology and computers, this was about such things getting into the wrong hands.

Gene Simmons just looks creepy, and I wish he'd play more villain roles. That being said, this movie was ok. Considering it's 1984, they predicted drones, roomba and self driving cars! A low budget but entertaining enough.