Runaway Train

A couple of years back when I watched the documentary Electric Boogaloo about Cannon Films, one of the movies that got a fair amount of attention in part because pretty much everyone involved with the documentary considered it one of the studio's best moves was Runaway Train. I noticed recently that it's available on TubiTV free with ads for streaming, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

As you can guess from the highly original title, there's a runaway train, but it takes a while before we get to the train. Instead, the movie starts at the Stonhaven maximum security federal prison in Alaska. One of the prisoners is Buck McGeehy (Eric Roberts), who seems to have a surprising amount of freedom to train as a boxer. Not only that, but there are boxing nights which seems like a bad idea because there are going to be prisoners who don't like each other and encouraging violence is bound to lead to violence outside the ring. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

One of the prisoners who has a lot less freedom is Oscar "Manny" Manheim (Jon Voight), who has escaped from the place on multiple occasions in the past, and has been kept in solitary confinement by the brutal warden, Rnken (John P. Ryan). The warden is so brutal that the solitary confinement is described as Manny being welded into his cell for three years, leading to a federal civil rights case, which Manny eventually wins, leading to his release back into the general population.

Manny, for his part, is violent enough to have enemies in the general population, and at the boxing matches, he gets stabbed. This causes him to bring forward his plans to escape, and needing help, brings Buck into the plan. Since you can't have a runaway train within the walls of the prison, you can probably guess that the escape is successful, at least in the short term.

Still, it's Alaska, and it's bitter cold and snowing, so the two men have to get to the safety of warmth quickly. They make their way to a train depot and overpower two of the workers there, exchanging clothing so the prisoners won't be seen in prison uniforms. They also hop a train, or at least a group of locomotives coupled together, with just one engineer on the train. He spots the men but is overpowered and suffers a fatal heart attack. Meanwhile, his attempt to stop the train has failed in that the brakes are burned out, which is what leads to the runaway train of the title.

Back in the dispatching station, we've got a couple of dispatchers much like Walter Matthau in The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three. They try to stop the train because, as far as they know, there's nobody on the train, the engineer having been found dead after falling off the train when he had his heart attack. Ranken doesn't know where his two fleeing prisoners are, but it's not going to take too long for him to put two and two together and determine that the prisoners are on the train.

And it just so happens that the prisoners aren't the only one on the train. Somebody blows the horn, and a young employee, Sara (Rebecca De Mornay) is also on the train. Her function is basically to serve as a sort of Greek chorus, informing the fugitives and the audience of the situation the two men face, and being a bit of moderation between them since they have divergent personalities. It also seems, as if the film is falling prey to one of the more common tropes, that Sara is falling in love with Buck....

When watching the opening credits of Runaway Train, one of the names you'll see is Japanese director Akira Kurosawa getting a writing credit. It turns out that he had read a news story back in the early 1960s about a runaway train, and wrote the genesis for the story we see here, but funding fell through and Kurosawa's movie was never made. Still, his name on the credits lends the movie a sensibility that's a bit different from other Hollywood action movies. In any case, the movie works, and it's easy to see why Runaway Train got a reputation as Cannon Films' finest hour.

Surprisingly to me, the movie also picked up Oscar nominations for both Voight and Roberts. The thing is, I didn't think of the roles as particularly demanding in the sense of Oscar-type acting. Physically yes; emotionally not so much. Not that this takes anything away from the film, which is highly entertaining and definitely extremely well-made. It's absolutely worth a watch if you haven't seen it before.