Opened 25 Years Ago: HEAT (12/15/1995)

 

HEAT
(US - 1995)
Directed by Michael Mann

HEAT opening in Toledo, OH on 12/15/1995

Retro Review: RUNAWAY TRAIN (1985)

RUNAWAY TRAIN
(US - 1985)

Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. Written by Djordje Milicevic, Paul Zindel and Edward Bunker. Cast: Jon Voight, Eric Roberts, Rebecca De Mornay, Kenneth McMillan, Kyle T. Heffner, John P. Ryan, T.K. Carter, Stacey Pickren, Walter Wyatt, Edward Bunker, Reid Cruickshanks, John Bloom, Hank Worden, Danny Trejo, Tommy "Tiny" Lister, William Tregoe. (R, 111 mins)

Though they were primarily known for Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris, and ninja movies, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus had serious aspirations as Cannon hit its stride in the mid '80s. Wanting artistic credibility, they began courting important, influential filmmakers like John Cassavetes (LOVE STREAMS), Robert Altman (FOOL FOR LOVE), Liliana Cavani (THE BERLIN AFFAIR), Lina Wertmuller (CAMORRA), Franco Zeffirelli (OTELLO), Roman Polanski (PIRATES), Jean-Luc Godard (KING LEAR), Barbet Schroeder (BARFLY), and Dusan Makavejev (MANIFESTO), among others. Released in late 1985 and expanding wide in early 1986, RUNAWAY TRAIN was the closest Golan and Globus came to working with legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, whose films like SEVEN SAMURAI and YOJIMBO are among the most iconic in all of cinema. Based on a never-filmed script that Kurosawa wrote and intended to shoot in 1966 following the release of RED BEARD, RUNAWAY TRAIN was re-written by the unlikely trio of Djordje Milicevic (VICTORY), YA novelist Paul Zindel (The Pigman), and crime writer and ex-con Edward Bunker, who scripted STRAIGHT TIME and would go on to play Mr. Blue in RESERVOIR DOGS. It was the second of four Cannon productions directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, a Russian filmmaker who more or less became Cannon's go-to, in-house art-house guy with 1984's MARIA'S LOVERS, 1986's DUET FOR ONE, and 1987's SHY PEOPLE. Konchalovsky broke away from Cannon for the 1989 Whoopi Goldberg/James Belushi bomb HOMER AND EDDIE and directed most of Warner Bros' mega-budget TANGO & CASH before he was fired and replaced by an uncredited Albert Magnoli (PURPLE RAIN).

Perhaps more than any other Cannon production, RUNAWAY TRAIN is representative of Golan and Globus straddling the line between mainstream and highbrow, with one foot in the grindhouse and the other in the art-house. At its core, it's a no-bullshit, edge-of-your-seat action movie with a very simple premise--right there in the title-- straight out of a B movie. At a maximum security prison in Alaska, lifer Manny Manheim (Jon Voight) is considered such a danger and an escape risk that he's spent the last three years in solitary with the door welded shut. When a court order forces vindictive, borderline psychotic warden Ranken (John P. Ryan) to let Manny back into general population, Ranken has another inmate attack Manny, which backfires and starts a prison riot. With none-too-bright and eager-to-please youngster Buck McGeehy (Eric Roberts) in tow, Manny manages to escape and the pair sprint miles through the snowy wilderness and hop aboard a four-car train. "Why this one?" Buck asks. "Because I want it," Manny replies, as if fate is drawing him to it.

As the train departs the railyard and Manny and Buck hide in the fourth car, the conductor suffers a fatal heart attack, falling off the train and leaving it in a way that overrides the automatic stop. The train accelerates at such a rate that it burns through the brakes and gains momentum, going at a high rate of speed with no one in control, barreling through the middle of desolate Alaskan nowhere. It takes the pair a while to figure this out, while railroad command center dispatcher Frank Barstow (Kyle T. Heffner) tries to manage the situation. Of course, arrogant hot shot Barstow designed the foolproof, fail-safe transportation communication system, which naturally, is neither foolproof nor fail-safe when the shit hits the fan. Ranken, meanwhile, correctly assumes that his two escaped cons are on the train, along with a third passenger, a rail line employee named Sara (Rebecca De Mornay), who eventually makes her way back from the second car to the fourth, where it's theoretically safer when the train inevitably crashes.

RUNAWAY TRAIN is one of the best films to come off the Cannon assembly line, but it's still basically a Cannon production, from a good chunk of Trevor Jones' score demonstrating that distinct '80s keyboard-and-drum-machine sound to the presence of perennial B-movie villain Ryan, best known for one of his rare good-guy roles in Larry Cohen's IT'S ALIVE and his other Cannon bad guy gigs in AVENGING FORCE and DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN. Nevertheless, RUNAWAY TRAIN got a lot of love from critics: it won rave reviews, was a Palme d'Or contender at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, and received three Oscar nominations: Voight for Best Actor (William Hurt won for KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN) Roberts for Best Supporting Actor (Don Ameche won for COCOON), and Henry Richardson for Film Editing (Thom Noble won for WITNESS). While it is a terrific genre film, it seems odd in retrospect that RUNAWAY TRAIN was such a critical favorite, especially given the dismissive treatment given to most Cannon fare. There's an argument to be made that the tenuous Kurosawa connection--1985 was also the year of RAN--made critics treat it with kid gloves or take it a little more seriously than they might have otherwise.

While seething with intensity, Voight and Roberts both use indecipherable accents and seem to be playing things far too broadly, with their performances--Voight's in particular--ranking among the hammiest to ever score Oscar nods. Roberts--back when he was supposed to be the Next Big Thing--really just offers a louder variation on his dumb, would-be gangster character in the previous year's THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE, even using the same affected voice ("Aw, Manny...take me wit ya!" and "I need some shooooooes!" providing some memorable moments). Voight, in his showiest role in years and one of only four films he made in the 1980s, chews the scenery in ways unseen until his incredible performance over a decade later in ANACONDA. There's really not much difference in Voight's acting here ("You gonna clean dat spot!") or when he winks at Jennifer Lopez after he's barfed-up in a partially digested state by a giant CGI snake. Voight dials it up to 11, which is extremely entertaining, but it sometimes seems like it's too much considering all the praise he and Roberts received. Watching RUNAWAY TRAIN again after many years, it's easy to picture a less frothing Manny providing a serious stretch for say, Cannon stalwart Charles Bronson if he felt like breaking away from vigilante movies. Voight and Ryan rage through clenched teeth and make perfect adversaries (though playing a maniacal villain, Ryan actually comes off as more restrained than Voight), and while many have questioned Ranken's thought process in dropping from a chopper on to the runaway train when it means certain death, it just goes to show that yes, at its core, RUNAWAY TRAIN is really just a dumb Cannon action movie with John P. Ryan as a very John P. Ryan bad guy--a great, textbook example of a Cannon action movie, sure, and maybe a bit more gritty than most, but had Kurosawa's name not been attached to it, it seems doubtful this would've received the accolades and the respect it got from critics.

On DVD/Blu-ray: Special "Late Summer Box-Office Bombs" Edition: GETAWAY (2013) and PARANOIA (2013)

GETAWAY
(US/UK/Switzerland/China - 2013)

It took four countries, location work in a fifth, and 25 credited producers to shit out this borderline-unwatchable car crash porno that leaves no stale cliché unutilized while wasting some death-defying work by an apparently insane Bulgarian stunt crew.  Director Courtney Solomon (DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, AN AMERICAN HAUNTING) hyped the film's "real" car chases and crashes and the absence of CGI.  I'm calling bullshit on the "no CGI," but yeah, most of the crash stuff is real.  The problem is that it's shot and edited in the most anti-entertaining, headache-inducing way imaginable, using multiple cameras with varying image quality (don't worry, that's written into the plot), and it's such a garbled, noisy blur that it's impossible to get a feel for any of it.  Solomon wanted the crash and stunt work to be real, but I suggest he take a look at John Frankenheimer's RONIN.  I've seen John Frankenheimer films.  I've studied John Frankenheimer films.  Courtney Solomon--you're no John Frankenheimer.

Acting as if he arrived on set and never shook the jetlag, Ethan Hawke is the improbably-named Brent Magna, a former racing wunderkind who bombed out on the circuit and fled to Europe to become a wheelman-for-hire.  He's looking to settle down with his Bulgarian wife Leanne (Rebecca Budig), but he arrives home to find she's been...taken.  Faster than you can say "Liam Neeson," Magna is being harangued on his cell phone by a mystery man (a mostly-unseen but heard-too-much Jon Voight, who sounds like he's doing an Armin Mueller-Stahl impression), who orders him to steal a tricked-out Shelby Super Snake and go around Sofia following his instructions (leading cops on chases, driving the car through crowded parks, etc) or Leanne will be killed, all the while taunting Magna and boring the audience with such hackneyed bad-guy zingers as "We're just getting started, my boy," and "You're running out of time...tick tock, tick tock."  Magna is soon joined by The Kid (Selena Gomez), who actually owns the car and is the key to the mystery man's plot:  Magna and The Kid are pawns in his plan to steal computer files from an investment bank whose CEO is The Kid's dad.  With a dozen cameras in and out of the Shelby, the mystery man is constantly watching them, but The Kid manages to hack into the mystery man's server through her tablet and fool him with the old "same footage looped" trick, crossing her fingers and hoping he's never seen SPEED.  In a truly magical happenstance, The Kid is whatever the story needs her to be at any given moment:  whiny rich kid, gearhead, ace hacker, and expert in international investment law.  Bravo, screenwriters!  I guess if you like crashes, shattering glass, screeching tires, a complete void of logic and suspense, and zoom-ins to Ethan Hawke making constipated faces as he pretends to drive a car, GETAWAY might be entertaining.  But for everyone else, it's an incoherent jumble with a dumb twist ending, and for all the work that went into the car chases, you can't make heads or tails of what's going on.  Also with Paul Freeman and PASSENGER 57 villain Bruce Payne in tiny roles, GETAWAY opened Labor Day Weekend and tanked in ninth place.  Offering nothing worthwhile and looking cheaper than any Bulgaria-shot DTV NuImage production, it's amazing that this actually made it to theaters at all.  (PG-13, 90 mins)


PARANOIA
(US/France - 2013)

Can we just admit that no one gives a shit about the Hemsworth brothers despite Hollywood doing its damnedest to make them happen?  Sure, Chris is a decent-enough actor who lucked into THOR and THE AVENGERS and got to co-star in THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (made long before THOR, but released after), but elsewhere, audiences haven't really warmed up to him:  no one cared about the RED DAWN remake and Ron Howard's racing drama RUSH flopped.  But Chris is a mega-star next to little brother Liam, who's in the HUNGER GAMES franchise, co-starred in a Miley Cyrus vehicle, and got killed early in THE EXPENDABLES 2--all films that don't depend on him--but has been met with crickets and tumbleweed everywhere else:  LOVE AND HONOR and EMPIRE STATE barely got released, and his big summer headlining splash with PARANOIA fizzled badly, opening in 13th place to become one of the biggest DOA duds of the summer.  The franchise gigs are good for them now, but does anybody really care otherwise?  When's the last time you heard anyone say "Man, I gotta see that new Chris Hemsworth flick!"?  PARANOIA is bad, but it's not all Liam's fault.  Sure, he's got no presence as a leading man and is really out of his league sharing scenes with three legends in the "just pay me and I'll ham" phase of their careers, but it's just a dumb, predictable, clichéd thriller that's so bored with itself that it never really tries to be anything more than a time-killer.  If ever a movie was made to fold laundry and balance your checkbook by, it's PARANOIA, and as such, it fits right in with auteur Robert "Still coasting on LEGALLY BLONDE" Luketic's other triumphs, like 21 and two Katherine Heigl rom-coms (THE UGLY TRUTH and KILLERS).

Hemsworth is Adam Cassidy, an ambitious cubicle drone at tech giant WyattCorp.  Driven for success and saddled with medical bills that insurance won't cover for his sick father (Richard Dreyfuss), Adam is convinced he's designed the next big thing in social networking.  When he bombs the presentation to sneering CEO Nicholas Wyatt (Gary Oldman) and he and his team lose their jobs, Adam treats them all to a $16,000 night at the club on his still-active corporate credit card.  An irate Wyatt then threatens to press charges unless Adam agrees to partake in some corporate espionage and infiltrate Eikon, another tech megapower owned by Wyatt's rival and former mentor Jock Goddard (Harrison Ford), to steal trade secrets so Wyatt can run Goddard out of business for good.  You know you're in for some cutting insight when Adam and Wyatt are shown playing chess (SYMBOLISM!) and Wyatt snottily declares "Checkmate!" (See! Adam's a pawn!  Get it?).  Of course, Adam becomes pupil to the master Goddard and falls for his top marketing exec Emma (Amber Heard), and they have no idea he's Wyatt's plant.  Or do they?   Hemsworth is bland enough on his own, but he and Heard are one of the most chemistry-impaired screen couples you'll ever see.  The film only really comes alive in the two instances where Oldman and Ford are onscreen together, but it's hardly the highlight of either actor's career.  If anything, it may well prompt you to watch AIR FORCE ONE again.  Oldman plays the pompous ass to the hilt in a performance that sounds like a tribute to Vinnie Jones ("Yaw ay-out when oy sigh yaw ay-out!  Oy eewn you!"), while Ford is indifferent and seems vaguely annoyed that he was talked into being in this.  For all the shit Robert De Niro takes about phoning in his performances and coasting on his past accomplishments, it seems we've let Ford off the hook.  There's a younger generation of moviegoers who see Ford as the guy who used to play Han Solo and Indiana Jones but is now just a grumpy old fart with an earring on talk shows.  Ford hasn't challenged himself in years (and this is his second bad tech flick, after 2006's absurd FIREWALL), though he does seem to relish the moment when he tells Hemsworth's Adam "Shut up...you're nothing but a convenient tool, an empty vessel."  Scripted line or Ford ad-lib?  Discuss.  (PG-13, 106 mins)