Runaway Train (1985) * * *

 

Directed by:  Andrei Konchalovsky

Starring:  Jon Voight, Eric Roberts, Rebecaa DeMornay, TK Carter, John P. Ryan, Kenneth McMillan, Kyle T. Heffner

Runaway Train is a prison break story married with a story of a runaway train speeding through the Alaska frontier on a route to nowhere.  The train has three unlikely passengers, prison escapees Manny (Voight) and Buck (Roberts), who think the train will take them to freedom, and Sara (DeMornay), the unfortunate railroad worker caught on the train and eventually in the middle.  Manny and Buck have essentially traded one prison for another, while Sara is herself imprisoned by the situation and by Manny and Buck.  

When Runaway Train opens, Manny is a prisoner at an Alaskan prison where he had just served three years in dark solitary confinement due to a previous escape attempt.  Warden Ranken (Ryan) hates him and releases him to general population in hopes that he'll try to escape again or start a fight, which will give the warden any excuse to kill him.  Buck is a champion prison boxer who hero worships Manny and wants to come along when Manny escapes from prison again. 

Manny and Buck trek through the freezing wilderness and nearly freeze to death before hopping on the train in which the engineer dies of a heart attack during the journey.  The dispatch team tries in vain to derail or slow the train down, but there is little hope of stopping it.  Meanwhile, Ranken wants nothing more than the opportunity to kill Manny himself, even if it means flying a helicopter over the speeding locomotive.  To Ranken, his hatred for Manny is so personal that it overshadows even common sense or self-preservation.

Runaway Train is at its heart an adventure story with the wounded Manny and Buck at the forefront.  Voight and Roberts received Oscar nominations for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively, playing generally unlikable, unsympathetic people but still allowing us enough room to hope they can grow or at least be better people.  Manny is more realistic about his chances on the outside than Buck, who dreams of a more fanciful life that likely won't come to an ex-convict, assuming he's not caught or killed.  We see the anger in them and each other, as if hopelessness is part of their daily routine.  

The movie concludes more or less as expected and it only reaches a certain level of power, but it works on the level of adventure which breaks up the bleakness.