Final Run: Corsa contro il tempo

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.

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.

You wonder how stupid a film has to get before you call it a spoof. You could easily have made this film twice as good by employing Leslie Nielsen to open the door to the cockpit and say "Good luck, we're all counting on you".

For me the suspense in these films is made by the realism. Intelligent people doing the sensible things that just don't go right, or the sensibly designed equipment is just not up to the job.

Here we have stupid people doing idiotic things, the laws of physics are completely ignored. Ropes pass through overhead cables. And quite frankly I think I designed a safer locomotive when I was 12. A bird with precise bowel movements could have shorted out this train.

In fact I recommend you watch it backwards, that way you can go from the obvious outcomes to the hilarious and unpredictable reasons that got them into that outcome.

This action packed movie is really suspenseful and does a good job of keeping you on the edge of your seats. I hope that this one comes out on video, I really want to watch it again. This is a great film for someone who likes suspense, action. There is the perfect amount of thrill for those interested in mechanics.

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?