Movie: Runaway Train (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1985)
It's perhaps a little greedy to ask for a couple more action set pieces in a movie that culminates with a spectacular chase scene between a sadistic prison warden hanging from a helicopter rope ladder and a runaway train harboring two escaped convicts. The helicopter and the train often appear in the frame together as they pass through and around the remote Alaskan wilderness and its snowy imposing mountains. You really get a great sense of the danger everyone is in, and the seeming impossibility of making it out alive. It makes every single move feel exciting and unpredictable, yet understandable in the larger context, allowing you to yell at the screen whenever you feel someone is making a dumb or unnecesarily dangerous decision. It helps too that the film has established the rivalry between warden Ranken (John P. Ryan) and Manny (Jon Voight) quite effectively. They are evenly matched and equally stubborn, turning their battle of wills into a personal vendetta that has a long time ago ceased to be about upholding the law or escaping for freedom. All of this works really well, but, alas, I really could have used a couple more action set pieces.
Runaway Train used to be always on TV and our TV guide always used to give it 5 stars, writing it up as a more mature film than the likes of Speed, Die Hard or Lethal Weapon. So it was OK that it was (in my mind at least) always playing a little too late in the evening - there would eventually come a time when I'd see it. And when the time did come, I remember it felt quite cool to finally be able to sit down and watch it. I also remember that I felt a tinge of disappointment after it ended, thinking that it wasn't as special as I expected it to be. Seeing it now, not much has changed. It's really good, but still not entirely satisfactory. Part of it may be that a train is inherently less exciting (at least in the context of action cinema) than a car, bus or plane. Konchalovsky has a lot of exterior shots of the train passing by with great speed, but seeing a train on the loose isn't much different than seeing a normally functioning train. Sure, it's faster, but it's still just a big unwieldy thing that moves in a straight line along a railway. If it gets derailed, the action will stop, so the options of showing it moving in ways that are out of the ordinary are limited, and you can entirely forget about having it do cool action stunts. And so, here we have a sequence where a train coming in from the opposite direction is moved to a different track right on time, and one where the out of control train passes over an old bridge with a speed that may or may not be too high for the bridge to withstand. Konchalovsky and co get as much suspense and excitement out of these scenes as they can, but that's mostly evoked through dialogue, good editing, and reaction shots. The movements of, in, and around the train itself are not that interesting. especially not in comparison to the deranged, chaotic violence of the prison fight scenes that set up the story and characters.
The film starts with Manny being released from three years of solitary confinement in an Alaskan maximum security prison, mostly so that Rankin will have an opportunity/excuse to hurt him when he tries to escape a third time. When he does, he is joined by Buck (Erick Roberts), who, as most prisoners looks up to him, but is too dumb to realise many things, including that Manny isn't too proud of his own criminal actions. Voight really does give a good performance as a cruel, ruthless man who regrets he doesn't know how to function in the world otherwise, but has no intentions to change his ways. Ranken (presumably) does, but still chooses to be as brutal as he possibly can in any given situation, without much remorse. The film wants to build some philsoophical ideas around this contrast quoting Shakespeare "No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast." I don't think the film is very convincing in exploring these ideas, but Voight, Roberts, and to a lesser extent John Ryan, take them to heart and add a primitive touch to their performances that makes them more interesting.
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