Huh? 'Runaway' Film Review

To those of us who fall in the "millenial" or Generation Y grouping of the early 1990s, we cannot remember the 1980s and thus cannot really understand what the heck was going through the minds of some people, especially regarding the cultural artifacts left behind in the decade's wake--the music, the movies, the questionable fashions, et al. Case in point: 1984's Runaway. At the end of watching this (mercifully brief) film, I was left with a certain taste in my mouth. If after watching the film someone walked up to me and asked the rhetorical question "Were the 80s really that bad?" I would be tempted to forget the Talking Heads and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and reply in seriousness, "Yes, yes they were."

First thing you should know is that Michael Crichton (of Jurassic Park fame) wrote and directed this film. Crichton has always been good with plots, but this film is probably the best example of why most writers should leave film adaptations of their works (or just the filmmaking in general) to the pros (i.e., Steven Spielberg.) The premise is that in the nebulous near-future robots have basically taken over the world's menial tasks. Sometimes, however, they end up going haywire, which is where the police division led by Ramsay (Selleck) and his plucky female partner (Cynthia Rhodes) comes in. However soon the killer robots are found to be the result of evil computer chips created by evil Luther (Gene Simmons). There's nothing wrong with the plot, far from it; in fact, it's a notch above the usual action film we see today. Elements of thrillers and chases flow organically, and there's a good job at creating tension with the pacing. Unfortunately, it falls short in several key areas. First is the somewhat comical overuse of cinema tropes, as if Crichton was a film school student who had just finished his Alfred Hitchcock seminar. Ramsay is in the electronics division because as the protagonist he has (of course) a critical flaw: vertigo. This fear of heights resulted in the death of six people, and has haunted him ever since. Naturally, where will the final showdown take place except on top of a under-construction skyscraper where he will confront his fears and overcome them?

The next big issue is casting and dialogue. Simmons actually makes a very good villain in terms of his brooding, dark demeanor (man, can that guy glower!) and is one of the better musician-to-actor crossovers I can think of (David Bowie's turn as Tesla in The Prestige was better, but I digress.) Rhodes, Kirstie Alley, and seemingly the entire female police force seem to have been cast because they are good looking rather than acting ability, but all the main parts are pulled off in a competent fashion. This is in spite of the script, which is mediocre by anyone's standards. The 'trivia' section of IMDB.com says that Ramsay's name is uttered more than once every two minutes of the film, which fits with the numbingly repetitive nature of some of the scenes. In fact, the best parts of the film are when there's little or no dialogue. Or music for that matter. Jerry Goldsmith produced a score for this film that I can only assume haunted him to his grave. Maybe he really liked the electronic synth sound that the 1980s is known for, or the producers foisted it on him, but it's horrible, no two ways about it.

The final issue is the scope and scale of the film. Judging by the fact that everyone is running around in 1980s clothes and cars, there was clearly a limited budget. Instead of going towards developing three-dimensional characters, what money they had was funneled to the effects and creating the skittering robots. And that's the problem. Rather than using stop-motion animation techniques to create active, exciting robots, real robots were apparently created--and they look god-awful. Luther's evil minions are spiderlike creatures that look like they were constructed using an Erector Set, or maybe Legos. They don't do much but shake like a rattle and "jump" (i.e., thrown from offscreen) at people to inject them with poison. Other robots include a shoebox packing heat, a guard robot that throws electric shocks and a household mechanical maid that even in the 1980s looked rather silly and stilted, so much so that it's hard to believe mankind had handed over the construction of their buildings and the safety of our world to these hulks of pitiful parts. What the film really needed was to scrap 10 or 15 minutes of questionable robot scenes and replaced them with meaningful dialogue and robots that actually looked like the work of evil geniuses rather than that kid I babysat.

Overall, Runaway is worth watching once, if only to laugh at. The film has aged horribly, turning into a sort of B-movie for people to throw popcorn at. A limited budget may be one reason for the poor quality of the film, but in the right hands excellent movies can be created with nothing but baling wire and suspension of belief. Alas, Runaway always makes you painfully aware that it is a movie--and by the time the hero descends from the building, covered in poorly-applied cosmetic burns and passionately kisses his partner (don't they have police regs against that) we're glad it's over.