Lower Depths Runaway Train

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

RV

Where are the disarming jokes? Where is the cheeky, kidding charm? Where are the stunts that draw gasps and laughs from the audience but not a drop of blood from their participants?

It is as if the makers of Runaway Train had never heard of Butch, Sundance, Indiana and the other relentlessly cheery adventurers of two decades. The result is a dour, weirdly compelling movie that is an act of either high creative courage or heedless self-destructiveness .

The plot is as linear as, well, a railroad line. Up in Alaska is the toughest prison in the history of the jailbreak genre. Inside are one psychopath named Manny (Jon Voight) and one addled punk named Buck (Eric Roberts). Outside is a blizzard. And the way into the whiteness is through a sewage system that Soviet Director Konchalovsky would like to make us smell if he could. Still, the snarling pair make it into the winter wonderland and hop a train, unaware that the engineer, having opened the throttle, has suffered a heart attack. It is not until a railroad worker (Rebecca De Mornay) stumbles on them and informs them of the facts that they undertake variously desperate efforts to slow their flight.

Voight unleashes a raw, grinding power, and the heroics are staged with scary authenticity and a proneness to ugly accident that ultimately humanize these hard cases. Runaway Train's destination may be the lower depths, but via selfconscious existentialism, it avoids the pits into which most action films fall these days.