Andrei Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train inflates a simple action-movie premise—two escaped convicts hide out on a freight train that goes out of control—into pseudo-philosophical camp, with Eric Roberts and Jon Voight shouting at each other in bizarrely mannered accents for much of the running time. The whole thing should be an unbearable slog, for wrapping tough-guy clichés in mock-Shakespearean portent. But as in later blockbusters like The Last Boy Scout and Con Air, the implausibilities of the plot are a feature, not a bug. This is one of the more fun and riveting thrillers of the 1980s, whose too-muchness is the point.
From the very opening scenes set in a remote Alaskan maximum security prison, the film buzzes with a tone of barely controlled chaos as the inmates start a near-riot upon the announcement that beloved criminal Oscar “Manny” Manheim (Voight) is being ordered by a court to be released from solitary confinement, where the hard-ass warden, Ranken (John P. Ryan), has welded him into his cell after a series of escape attempts. Especially excited about Manny’s return to the general prison population is a gormless rapist, Buck McGeehy (Roberts), who idolizes the bitterly cynical senior convict. Manny enlists Buck to assist him in his plan to break out of the slammer for good, and after successfully making their way through the sewers underneath the prison, the men make an arduous trek through the frozen Alaskan wilderness and hop aboard a freight train bound for civilization. But when the engineer suffers a sudden heart attack, the engine loses control, and Manny and Buck must find a way to either stop or get off the out-of-control locomotive.
Runaway Train was based on a screenplay by Akira Kurosawa that was subsequently pared down and punched up by hard-bitten writer Eddie Bunker, who’d done a stint in San Quentin and whose personal experiences lend the film’s prison sequences a hyper-cynical verisimilitude. But Bunker’s handling of character is considerably wobblier than his attention to setting. For one, the central characters feel closer to symbols than actual people—Buck a vision of possibility and hope that stands in sharp contrast to Manny, the embodiment of a hopeless death drive. Buck’s brutal, Hobbesian worldview can be summed up in his response to the accusation that he’s an animal: “No, worse! Human. Human!”
Roberts and Voight overcompensate for the fundamental shallowness of their characters by giving two of the most outrageously over-the-top performances ever committed to celluloid. Buck is a dim-witted naif who, considering Roberts’s nutty voice and mannerisms, suggests a cross between Forrest Gump and Ernest P. Worrell, while Voight’s would-be method intensity comes off as a weird mishmash of Marlon Brando’s slurry intonations and Al Pacino at his most shouty and unhinged. Eventually, more than halfway through Runaway Train’s runtime, a female train worker, Sara (Rebecca De Mornay), is introduced, which might’ve offered a chance to disrupt the macho dynamic. But Sara turns out to be little more than a plot device, and even after she recedes into the scenery, Roberts and Voight continue to chew it unabated.
The sheer preposterousness of the lead performances have the effect of liberating us from taking the script’s bombastic philosophizing too seriously. Instead, we’re free to enjoy the film for its muscular genre pleasures, which are certainly not inconsiderable. Runaway Train ultimately delivers exactly what it advertises on the tin: propulsive, unrelenting action aboard an out-of-control locomotive. The train smashes through railroad cars and speeds across a nearly crumbling bridge; characters tread precariously on top of it; and, during the film’s unrelenting final 40 minutes, Ranken even descends onto the engine from a helicopter. These scenes are captured with an unshowy, almost documentary-like wide shots by Konchalovsky and his crew that imbues the action with a remarkable level of you-are-there intensity.
There’s a smeary, almost painterly quality to images of the locomotive slicing through the vast whiteness of the landscape as the snow and scenery blur past in the foreground, which a visual motif Tony Scott would embellish into near abstraction in his semi-remake from 2010, Unstoppable. But Konchalovksy also makes expressive use of the cramped interior of the train car, arranging the actors in creative ways that emphasize both their physical closeness and the vast emotional distance between them. The film’s most stirring moment, however, is its last: As the engine speeds off into the snowy abyss, Manny trudges atop it, facing the biting wind and bitter cold with grim acceptance of his own certain death. It’s a shot of such force that it even manages to retrospectively lend some weight to Manny’s otherwise facile existentialist soliloquies. If Runaway Train’s reach often exceeds its grasp—a point driven home by the quote from Richard III that appears on screen just before the credits roll—this final image nevertheless serves as a rousing distillation of the film’s bleak and beautiful power.
Image/Sound
Kino Lorber brand new 2K master accentuates the beauty of Runaway Train’s wintry landscapes while also highlighting some of its technical shortcomings. The presentation stays true to the film’s muted color timing while enhancing the rich, black shadows, which are particularly noticeable in the early escape sequence. Certain scenes look almost as though they were shot in black and white, with little pops of color—such as the characters’ rosy red cheeks—standing out in contrast. The master rightfully doesn’t make any attempt to clean up cinematographer Alan Hume’s gritty, grainy images, though certain defects, like blown-up insert shots, artificial snow effects, and a laughably unconvincing painting that serves as an exterior shot of the prison, are emphasized by the new master. Kino’s 16-bit DTS-HD soundtrack is a bit less rich than the ones you’ll find on earlier Blu-ray releases from Arrow and Twilight Time, but the film’s appropriately harsh sound design still shines through, with Trevor Jones’s Wagnerian synth score filling the room with appropriately orotund force.
Extras
Unlike the earlier Arrow release of Runaway Train, which had a bevy of special features, Kino Lorber has unfortunately provided only a single extra here: an audio commentary track with Eric Roberts and cult film aficionados David Del Valle and C. Courtney Joyner. There’s an amusingly awkward tension between Del Valle and Joyner’s nerdy, slightly pretentious approach to film history and Roberts’s comparatively laidback and functionalist view of moviemaking. In one particularly humorous moment, with a refreshing lack of circumspection or false modesty, Roberts openly speculates that producer Menahem Golan bought his and Jon Voight’s Oscar nominations. The trio eventually settle into a relatively relaxed rapport as they trade production factoids and on-set anecdotes, as well as lots and lots of flattery for Roberts and Voight. For his part, Roberts gradually reveals that he’s considerably more thoughtful about the craft of moviemaking than his anything-for-a-paycheck résumé might suggest.
Overall
Though light on extras, Kino Lorber’s release highlights the harsh beauty and bitter bombast of Andrei Konchalovsky’s outsized action drama.
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