Alaska during winter. Manny and Buck, two convicts, escape from an isolated prison through an underground sever. In order to get as far as possible from the prison, they arrive at a train station and board a train with three wagons. Unbeknownst to them, the train engineer died from a heart attack, and thus the train is running 80 miles per hour without a driver. When an employee, Sara, arrives at their wagon, they finally find out they are out of control. A traffic dispatchers team decides to re-direct the train to crash, in order to avoid a collision with a chemical plant. Manny decides to climb up to the main engine to press the "stop" button. When the prison warden, Racken, arrives via helicopter on the engine, Manny changes his plan: he dislodges the wagons with Sara and Buck into safety, while he continues to head towards doom together with Racken in the main engine.
An interesting forerunner to "Speed", "Runaway Train" is a simple, yet effective piece of action suspense, built around a great concept: three people stuck on a runaway train without a driver, driving 80 miles per hour, where they never know when the end of the tracks might signal their own end. While good, the movie rarely truly causes an adrenaline rush: unlike the similar "Wages of Fear", "Runaway Train" did not exploit all the rich possibilities to the fullest, lacking a true versatility of events and imagination of what could happen in this situation, since the three trapped protagonists in a wagon spend too much time arguing between themselves and just sitting passively, instead of doing something about their problem. The only exception is the ending, when Manny finally decides to crawl towards the main engine, but even that is interrupted by a pointless subplot where Manny's nemesis, warden Racken, randomly lands on the train via a helicopter, which is illogical (if he knows that the train is going to crash and kill everyone anyway, why go there to kill Manny?). Racken's entire opening act, the movie's first 20 minutes, should have been cut to allow the movie to start with the escape of the convicts. Excellent actors help the movie, especially Jon Voight as Manny, who proves his scale when he argues with Sara that he won't be "waiting for no miracle" in the train, but take the things into his own hands. The stunt work is phenomenal, especially when Manny or Buck are holding on to the top of the wagon while the train is driving like crazy, whereas the snowy landscapes give it a cozy aesthetics. While not quite able to slowly build up its suspense to the fullest, the story has a few great moments (when the train collides with the back side of a wagon that was trying to get out of the way to the neighboring track; it drives over a collapsing, frail bridge).
Grade:++
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