Runaway Train (1985)

I never thought I'd be writing a genuinely positive review for a film produced by Cannon. Runaway Train stars Jon Voight and Eric Roberts as cons who escape from an Alaskan maximum security prison and get caught on a train that loses control through the tundra. Voight plays Manny, a rough, misanthropic convict who may have completely gone sour. Roberts plays a not-so-smart but enthusiastic young buck who tags along because he sees Manny as a kind of hero. What's so striking about the film is that while the characters face the obstacles you would expect out of a suspense/action film involving runaway trains, a good portion of the time is spent just with the characters as they hash out their problems, their insecurities, their jilted worldviews. In the face of possible death at the hand of circumstance, they're forced to confront themselves. Voight overacts and gets a ton of kind of weird off-the-cuff monologues, but they were entertaining and not terribly distracting. They spoke more to the nature of his character than any relevance to the plot. Roberts' character was pretty spot-on podunk dummy who means well. Based on a Kurosawa script (which is maybe why it's a cut above the usual Cannon ilk), and directed by Andrei Konchalovsky who I know very little about, the film, despite some major flaws in the third act, lives up to its critical reputation. An excellent Cannon film is a mythical thing, and Runaway Train doesn't disappoint. Highly recommended.

8/10