- Title: Runaway
- Year: 1984
- Rating: PG-13
- Director: Michael Crichton
- Cast: Tom Selleck, Gene Simmons, Cynthia Rhodes, Kirstie Alley
Police Sergeant Jack Ramsay, a specialist in the pacification of robots that have run amok, must defeat a psychopathic robotocist on a mechanized killing spree.
Rewind . . .
. . . to the late eighties and every weekend on HBO you’d see an interesting spectacle — the guy from KISS trying to kill Magnum PI with acid-spitting arachno-bots. It was Runaway, a movie costing millions, helmed by world-famous best-selling author Michael Crichton, and starring a fairly big name in the person of Tom Selleck — a movie that looked cheap, played fast and lose with logic, and exuded very little charisma even then. As a Saturday afternoon time-kill it worked OK, and I know I watched it several times — after all, it did satisfy the basic nutritional needs of a twelve year old boy: robots, heat-seeking gyrojets, and a younger and considerably less ample Kirstie Alley taking off her shirt.
But in a year that gave lovers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror a veritable smorgasbord in the form of Ghostbusters, The Terminator, Dune, The NeverEnding Story, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Star Trek III, Red Dawn, Gremlins, Repo Man, Ice Pirates, The Night of the Comet, The Last Starfighter, Iceman, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Starman, Dreamscape, Children of the Corn, A Nightmare on Elmstreet, CHUD, and 2010 . . . Runaway seems like the worst of the lot, with very little in the way of redeeming features.
The premise, of course, is that in the future we’ll get all those robots we were always promised — but that occasionally they’ll kill us with kitchen knives or grandpa’s revolver. Sergeant Ramsay is the go-to guy on the force to take care of these electronic ‘runaways’ — but it seems his job mostly involves capturing renegade farm bots and errant construction equipment — imagine Rick Dekard chasing down a slower, dumber version of Johnny Five and you have a close approximation. We are introduced to this concept when Ramsay and his new partner are helicoptered out to a field to jump on a caterpillar-eating machine about as big as a lawnmower and slightly less threatening than a triple-slotted toaster while five able-bodied farmhands stand by and smirk. Welcome to the future, where new and more outlandish ways of wasting your tax dollars have been discovered.
Not that that thought would have necessarily occurred to a twelve-year old me, and to give that smaller and less hairy version of myself his fair shakes before I completely stomp all over this movie, I do remember liking Runaway at one point. Not a lot, mind you, but I did get a kick out of the spider bots, the car chase bots, the driving bots, the sniffer bots . . . which reminds me of the ridiculous overspecialization and over-design that goes into these things. How does putting legs on a robot designed to pick up chemical smells make sense, when it’s already small enough to hold in your hand? In fact, it really seems like every excuse to include a robot to do what could easily be done some other way was seized upon, as if the roboticists of the future all went to the Rube Goldberg school of design. I mean, our first glimpse of a robot in the movie shows an arm adjusting some guys lamp, for Calvin’s sake!
Fast Forward . . .
. . . to a time when Gene Simmons’ family life is the subject of popular television, Tom Selleck is mostly forgotten, and the notion that robots the size and shape of a dish-washer would one day wheel around the modern home as domestic servants seems about as realistic as the rest of The Jetsons. And here Crichton proves himself to be no futurist — not that I would ever penalize someone for getting things wrong, no. It’s that Crichton does not even try. His technophobe message doesn’t work in Runaway because it is ridiculous, because the machines themselves are oafish boxes, and because robots don’t seem to belong in this version of the future in any integral or indispensable ways. Picking huge caterpillars off crops one-by-one, stacking bags of concrete, performing security — the special effects technology of 1984 wasn’t even up to the the task of making the robots at least appear competent at even those tasks.
The acting is passable in Runaway, even Gene Simmons’ evil-for-evil’s sake Dr. Luther (who, if he had had a mustache, would have definitely twirled it) works for what it is. It’s the writing and, especially, the visuals of the film that don’t work. On the writing front we get maddening logic boners like the premise of the car chase scene. Ramsay is transporting Luther’s girlfriend, who has the templates for the patented EVIL CHIP that Luther wants so badly. Luther sends little homing bombs down the highway right at the car with his girlfriend in it — the girlfriend, as I said, that has the thing he can’t bear to lose. And how does he track her? A bug in her purse — the purse that was the only thing not put through the high tech scanner (deliberately!) that pulled four other tracking devices off this same woman. Stupid plot points like that are par for the course with dumb action b-movies, but not from hotshot novelist writer-directors! And in a move as lazy as it is ridiculous, Crichton even uses a police psychic to advance the plot at one point!
What’s more, Runaway looks and sounds like a b-movie. Very bland and static camera work throughout, lighting that looks like it was intended for the typical home office, and completely uninspired art and set design. Jerry Goldsmith’s relentlessly needling synth score on occasion enters the realm of elevator music. Runaway is really rather reminiscent of a made for television cable movie, and I have to feel sorry for everyone involved in this film that, no doubt, thought they were going to be featured in some sort of visionary, stylish, near-future thriller. I would not at all be surprised if Selleck’s failure to ever really make the transition from TV to film did not have at least a bit to do with Runaway.
In short, Runaway is a perfect storm of things gone wrong. If any one of the film’s elements had been strong or original, it could have at least qualified as entertaining, even if only through the lens of nostalgia. But, as it is, I have to conclude it is one of the worst of the genre films I remember watching as a kid, and I’d recommend that anyone with vaguely fond memories of it from twenty years ago just leave it in the past where it belongs.
- Nostalgia Rating: About on par with Fruit Roll-Ups
- Rewatch Potential: Nil
- Wilhelm Scream?: Well, my name in German is ‘Wilhelm,’ and I was screaming through most of this, so technically . . .
- Unexpected Cameo: Lieutenant Harris, as himself
- Verdict: Blade Runner as a Lifetime Original Movie
What I Learned: That, aside from the homicidal robots, the future will look exactly like the mid eighties.
Top Marks: If you were to twist my arm I’d have to say Tom Selleck. The guy is really the only thing that holds this movie together, and he does have a charismatic screen presence that gets him past some of the more absurd moments of the script.
If (When) It’s Remade: Well, it couldn’t be any worse, and with today’s technology at least we’d get something visually interesting. But, without any sort of heavy name recognition and given that the theme seems increasingly antiquated the further into the future we get . . . I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one, and I hope it stays buried.
Final Thoughts: A door answering machine? Because it really is so much more convenient to stop by someone’s house to leave them a message. And, seriously, the evil Dr. Luther’s big bluff to get through the door is that he works for ‘Acme Robot Repair?’ What is he, a disciple of Wile E. Coyote?
This review is part of an ongoing series entitled Movies of a Misspent Youth, that looks at all the great fantasy, science fiction, and horror films available to the generation of kids growing up in the boom years of the 1980s. For more in this series, please visit my Film & TV page.
