When Runaway Train arrived in theaters forty years ago, it seemed nobody knew what to make of it. It wasn’t a runaway hit, it was nominated for some lukewarm awards amidst some stiff competition, but here was Cannon Films, the schlock factory that gave us Death Wish 2 and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, releasing an existential action thriller based on an unmade Akira Kurosawa screenplay.
The same studio pumping out weekly Chuck Norris vehicles greenlit a Russian director’s prison drama starring Jon Voight as a philosopher-convict. It opened in eighth place and never recovered in spite of good word of mouth. This just goes to prove that sometimes, the best films are the ones nobody sees coming down the track.
We all know the Cannon story: cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus bought a dying studio in 1979 off the success of Lemon Popsicle (a movie they later remade in America as The Last American Virgin) and turned it into the McDonald’s drive-thru of action cinema. Need ninjas? They had ninjas. Need Charles Bronson shooting punks? They had those. Need a quick and cheap cash-in on a fad like breakdancing? I’m starting to repeat myself.
What gets lost in the Cannon VHS nostalgia is that Golan genuinely thought he was on par with Orson Welles. Between churning out Missing in Action films, he’d court serious directors like John Cassavetes (Love Streams), Franco Zeffirelli (Otello), and Robert Altman (who wisely ran away). These prestige projects weren’t just about respectability, though. Golan was a fan and a cinephile, and he jumped at the opportunity to put his favourite directors to work, often with minimal oversight.
Runaway Train sits at the crossing of those two Cannon identities. It’s got prison riots, knife fights, and a climactic brawl on top of a speeding locomotive. It’s also a philosophical drama about the nature of freedom, directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, who had previously made Siberiade, a four-and-a-half hour Soviet epic about Siberian oil workers. Only Cannon was in a position to combine those elements in the same production.
The film earned three Oscar nominations: Actor, Supporting Actor, Editing – and became the prestige release Cannon had been aiming for. If only it had made money. Voight was coming off a career slump and played Manny like King Lear crossed with a rabid dog. Roberts, in full Method mode, allegedly stayed in character for the entire shoot. Danny Trejo wasn’t nominated for anything, but he appears briefly in the opening scene, back when he was still playing “Convict #3” instead of mister “Danny Trejo.”
Runaway Train works precisely because it’s a Cannon film. No major studio at the time was going to let Konchalovsky turn a stripped-down escape thriller into a psychological character study. By 1986, Golan and Globus were already moving toward bigger productions, stretching their resources across a slate that would soon include Over the Top, Masters of the Universe and Superman IV. Those were the films that would tip the company into collapse.
Four decades years later, Runaway Train stands as the clearest expression of Cannon at full reach – even if at the time, it was deemed too smart for the action crowd and too pulpy for the arthouse.
From Lifeforce to Cyborg, Cannon produced some quality fodder, but it also had enough balls to aim at the Bijou balcony seats. This, along with titles like Barfly and Street Smart, is what the top end of Cannon looked like before the whole operation slipped out of control – and crashed into the ’90s. -Pop