A 30 secondi dalla fine

I remember watching this as a kid and thinking it was an incredibly powerful film, but i forgot how strong the performances are, particularly Voight's. Roberts is good, but he's basically playing second fiddle to Voight's hulking, frightening, feral, almost mythical Manny, a con so dangerous the warden has kept him in solitary confinement for three years straight.

Roberts is a younger convict who idolizes Manny and helps him escape from the Alaskan prison where they both reside. they end up on a train barrelling down the tracks at 90mph with no conductor and no way to stop it. The film is based on a screenplay by the legendary Akira Kurasawa.

Great action scenes. Muscular film-making. It just seems they don't make films like this anymore. Films that aren't trying to pander to a certain demographic. This is lean, mean action all the way.

And that "little biddy spot" monologue Voight has halfway through the film is really breathtaking. He should have won an Oscar for that alone.

Based around a screenplay written by the legendary Akira Kurosawa, Runaway Train simultaneously follows three threads. The escape of two prisoners, Manny & Buck, who jump on a train only to find that the driver has a heart attack, thus it speeds out of control. Then there is the efforts of the train dispatching office to try and safely stop the out-of-control train. And also there's the hunt by the sadistic prison warden who is hellbent on recapturing the fleeing convicts.

Relentless and engrossing action film from start to finish, Runaway Train boasts two Oscar nominated performances from John Voight {Manny} and Eric Roberts {Buck} and no little intelligence with its well scripted characters. The opening quarter is pretty stock routine prison fare, these guys are tough, the warden is a bastard and we just know they are going to escape. But once the guys board the train the whole film shifts in gear and tone. The dynamic that exists between Manny & Buck, partners but very different in life approach, is riveting stuff courtesy of the nifty dialogue exchanges. Things are further enhanced by the appearance of Rebecca DeMornay's also stranded railway worker, Sara, who far from being a shoe-horned token female character, is the crucial piece of the emotional jigsaw. He presence gives the guys room to exorcise their demons and pour out their feelings of anger, bravado and mistrust.

The action scenes are very well handled by director Andrei Konchalovsky and his crew. As the train hurtles thru the snowy Alaskan wilderness we are treated to a number of crash bang wallops involving the train itself; derring-do from our boys on the icy outside of the locomotive, and a helicopter pursuit chartered by the obsessed John P. Ryan as Warden Ranken particularly stand out. Bona fide action sequences that are executed skilfully. Then we get to the finale, a finale pumped up for emotional impact, both visually and orally it closes the film justly. We even get time for a bit of Will Shakespeare as we go about reflecting on what we have just witnessed. A fine movie it be. 7.5/10

Indeed a fine piece, from the era when action movies were taken over by the likes of Schwarzenegger or Stallone. But the production company seemed to completely ignore this fact, and have chosen to base their movie on an old Akira Kurosawa screenplay. Risky choice, but as we know it didn't paid off - it was the last Northbrook film, and the Cannon-Golan companies didn't last much longer either. So Runawy Train might have been a financial failure, but I'd call it an artistic success. The technical specs doesn't show that it was shot on some kind of special equipment, but the way they captured the snowy landscape is still a masterpiece. If someone appreciates this kind of detail, it's definitely a must-watch movie (in the digitally renewed version, if possible). Otherwise the story is good too - not as much action, craziness and twists as in other 80s productions, but it has a tasty outcome between the good guy and the bad guy - probably Kurosawa would have done it better, but I really can't blame the directors for every little mistake. The last strong point of this movie is probably the cast, however - some might find Eric Roberts and a few supporting actors a bit irritating sometimes. Anyways, Jon Voight is at his best here. Unfortunately, other aspects of the movie seemed to be rather mediocre - very generic music choices, dull stunts and decorations, strange cuts. But those only play a minor part in the big picture, so I can recommend Runaway Train to anybody, who's just after a little entertainment.

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).