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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
 Posted - 11/03/2007 : 3:39:12 PM
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I saw this movie on the old family Betamax in 1985. I really dug it. It had heat-seeking bullets, a neato car chase, super-hot women, and best of all, robotic spiders. Robotic spiders! How could any 12-year-old not get into it?
I bought the DVD (which has no extras other than the trailer, dammit) out of a combination of nostalgia and boredom last week. Watching it now, I love it even more. On top of all the fun stuff mentioned above, it’s also narratively incompetent. Lots of good technological ideas thrown out, cool actions scenes, but the straightforward cop-and-robber story is only good for about 10 minutes worth of story and the rest of the 90-minute movie is pure filler.
The DVD box seems encouraging for the first-time viewer. Written and directed by Michael Crichton, good stuff. Soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith, good stuff. Starring Tom Selleck, good stuff, especially in ’84, when Selleck was THE dominant male TV sex cymbal on top of being a generally likable actor to watch. On the box front, Selleck is also sporting a manlier ‘stache and close-cropped hair, giving him even more pheromonal phirepower. Oddly, he’s also holding a gun that he will never hold in the movie. Other box hints are unremarkable. Cynthia Rhodes was pretty much unknown. Kristie Alley was great in Star Trek II, but other than that was a pretty much unknown quantity as well. What captured 12-year-old Food’s interest even more than robotic spiders was the casting of Gene Simmons. He was a very very known quantity, but not as an actor. Runaway was pretty much the first movie for the Kiss bassist.* Musician trying to act? Uh oh. Musician trying to act in his first movie? Double uh-oh. Back then I didn’t care, and today, first-time viewers might be excited at the chance of seeing the God of Lightning making a fool of himself, especially the substantial number of people who hate Simmons with a passion.
[* - He starred in Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, but he stayed in stage makeup and costume throughout, so it was really Simmons the stage persona doing the acting rather than Simmons the man. Hence, I don’t count it.]
Here we go!
The opening gredits play over an extreme close-up of computer graphics. Not too interesting, they’re just random semigeometric shapes appearing and disappearing, with a bespectacled Jack Ramsey (Selleck) and his partner Sgt. James (Stan Shaw) looking intently at the innards of then-high-tech computer circuitry. The soundtrack is all techno, too, so the goldfish and tetras in the audience will get that this is a movie about technology stuff (it’s a Michael Crichton movie, so no surprise). There’s an ominous sign when we see G. W. Bailey in the credits. He was the buffoonish police captain in the buffoonish Police Academy series.
I might as well note right now that the ever-versatile Jerry Goldsmith goes full 80s synth techno for this movie. It ain’t bad, none of the passages ever seem out of place, but it doesn’t stick in the brain much, either. So when reading this dissection, put on some 80s synth and you’ll have the feel.
The credits done, Jack Ramsey (Selleck) in pulled from his work by a phone call about an “agricultural model.” As he’s fixing to exit, G. W. Bailey enters. He’s playing a police chief in this movie too, which doesn’t help any because all we can think of is Police Academy. He’s never given a name. The credits list him as Chief, so that’s what I’ll call him. Chief introduces Ramsey to his new partner, Karen Thompson (Rhodes). Ramsey says c’mon, and the two make their way to the police helipad. On the way, exposition is delivered reasonably smoothly by way of good-to-meet-you chit-chat. We learn that Thompson is a new assignee from the Traffic Division, she’s only kinda-sorta good with computers, and she’s a total eager beaver.
When this scene ends, we’re 3:18 into the movie. So the movie seems to be getting right to the action. Nice!
Cut to a caterpillar munching on a leaf. A robotic arm rises into view, grabs the roly little fellow, and drops him on a series of metal rollers which then whirr into high speed, crushing the poor thing to death! Damn! I’m no good at determining these sort of things, so I honestly don’t know whether that was a real caterpillar or not. The American Humane Society’s movie pages say nothing about the movie either way. I hope that was a fake. There’s no reason to go killing the little caterpillars.
Medium shots show a pair of squat yellow robots, like the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots that I never got to play with as a kid. They’re doing pest control, but one of them is plowing over the corn stalks.
In the chopper, newbie Thompson is gearing up full-scale and is disappointed when Ramsey says that it’s not a big job and may only involve throwing a switch to deactivate the renegade robot. Ramsey asks the pilot if they’re almost there, the pilot says let’s take a look, and the tinted windows untint. That’s a nice subtle touch of then-futurism. I didn’t notice it before. Ramsey is hesistant about taking a look out the now-bright windows. When Thompson asks if he’s okay, he says he doesn’t like heights. She recommends deep breaths, he mildly snaps at her and tells the pilot to hurry up and land. Even if I hadn’t seen this movie before, I think I would’ve recognized that acrophobia will come into play later.
The ‘copter lands next to some present-day-looking farmers and their trucks. Thompson plunges on into the cornfields to find to robot while Ramsey gets routine info from the farmers. Before Ramsey can catch up to her, she hoists the robot aloft and shouts, “Yaaaay!”
Digression: Who says, “Yay?” Every time I hear it in a movie, I wince. Talia Shire says it in Rocky III when Rocky KOs Clubber, Rhodes says it here, and Taylor’s fellow astronauts give a triple “yay” when they jump into the lake in Planet of the Apes. End digression.
Action Scene 1
The robot must be feeling humiliated at being captured by a lady who says “Yay,” because sparks start shooting out of it. There’s a reaction shot of the farmers laughing at her, saying, “Coulda seen that comin.’” Ramsey and Thompson take off in pursuit. The chase is about 40 seconds long, though given how slow the robot moves, I don’t see how. **shrug** Manufactured by the Vorhees Corporation, I guess. Granted, the two humans are having to push their way through dense corn stalks (filmed on location in Moses Lake, Washington. Excellent!), but they can see where the robot is by the rustling and shaking of the tops of the stalks, so catching up to it shouldn’t be too much trouble.
That’s a nitpick, though, because this is a lighthearted chase. At one point, Ramsey dives for the robot, misses by inches, and winds up sprawled face-down in the dirt. It’s like a goofier episode of Magnum, P.I.. When the rustling corntops approach them (I don’t know why they didn’t approach the thing from different directions), they look at each other with “Oh s**t!” expressions, then simultaneously leap onto the robot. From over the corntops, we see massive sparks fly. Cut to the farmers giggling, and one of them says, “World War III!” as they enjoy the mushroom cloud (!!) that rises into the sky. Cut to Ramsey and Thompson, faces covered in soot (Thompson with a dazed “That sucked!” look on her face) as they haul the robot away. The farmers chatter about how they could’ve just as easily blown it up with own guns. End action scene 1.
The task completed, Ramsey and Thompson stroll back to the chopper and give more exposition. So this is what the Runaway unit of the police force does: Deactivates robots that go berserk. Ramsey got into it pretty much by accident and likes it okay. The subtle implication is that the Runaway unit is pretty much a flunkie’s department. The very unsubtle implication is that Ramsey is afraid of heights. By now it’s offputtingly obvious that this will come into play later, because it’s horribly introduced into the dialogue. Here’s how it goes:
Thompson: You ever want to work the regular force?
Ramsey: This is the regular force. You mean working the streets? Yeah, I did that. I had to stop.
Thompson: Because of vertigo?
Ramsey: Yeah, I don’t like heights. I’ve had it all my life.
I can’t imagine how vertigo would come into play on a regular police force, even a police force of the near future. Now, if this was a distant future where cars were hovercars that soared at all altitudes throughout the cities, then giving Ramsey a fear of heights would be no worse than Jaws given Martin Brody a fear of the water, because we’d know that that particular environment was going to come into play sooner or later anyway. But this movie gives no indication that acrophobia will be an issue, except this drill-sergeant-from-hell-screaming-into-a-stadium-PA-system giveaway. Yuck, movie.
Back at the office workspace, Thompson asks Sgt. James (that’s Ramsey’s black sidekick) about Ramsey acrophobia. Movie, come on! We get it! James says that several years ago, Ramsey’s acrophobia caused him to give up pursuit of a criminal who took refuge in a skyscraper under construction. Having eluded Ramsey, the criminal went on to kill six people. As a kid, I assumed the criminal James talks about to be the villain of this movie. As it turns out, though, it probably isn’t. It’s never mentioned again, nor does Ramsey ever seem to dwell on it. Thompson’s reaction to this is, “He can’t blame himself for that. Those things happen.” Uh….criminal evades police and kills six people. “Those things happen” is definitely NOT a reaction I’d want to hear from a cop.
They begin to make chit-chat when another runaway call comes in, this time involving fatalities. Ramsey pops back into shot, and he and Thompson head out.
Cut to a suburban area swarming with police cars, ambulances, and floodlights. A plainclothes cop informs Ramsey that a domestic robot has killed the wife and her sister and there’s a 10-month-old still alive inside the house. The Deceased Duo made it outside before they died, and their wrapped corpses lay in the front yard so Ramsey can have an off-screen peek at them. The plainclothes cop tells him that the pathologist says the weapon was probably an ordinary kitchen knife. So the pathologist did the examination and left the bodies are still lying there on the lawn?
Thompson uses the onboard computer in the police cruiser to get classically 80’s data and schematics on the robot model. It looks just like the agricultural robots from earlier. Those things were no taller than knee-high, so it’s kinda hard to believe they’d be able to kill two people. I guess it coulda stabbed them in the femoral arteries, that oughta do it, and that’d also enable them to run outside before bleeding to death. When I worked at a Burger Queen in the early 90s, there was an evening manager who died that way, shot in the femoral artery, bled to death without even knowing it was that serious (I wasn’t there, but we got more details than we ever wanted to hear).
While he gets prepped for entry into the house, the movie tries for some incisive commentary on media culture. A newswoman asks Ramsey for details, but he doesn’t wanna talk. She throws out the clichés, “The pubic has a right to know,” and “We [meaning the press] can be the judge of what’s newsworthy.” Ramsey remains calmly aloof. When he ends the discussion with “Not tonight,” she immediately turns to the camera and says, “There you have it! The first confirmation from Sergeant Ramsey that there is a child still alive inside…” etc. It may have been biting in ’84, but today, we recognize that as a pretty quaint and harmless form of journalism’s lack of ethics.
A “floater” is sent into the house. The floater is a small triangular device that floats around (obviously wire work, but I couldn’t actually see the wires, so its good) to do reconnaissance in dangerous spots so humans don’t have to. Ramsey watches the images on closed-circuit TV. The floater sees a house in disarray, some blood stains, and the knife lying on the floor. Then a gunshot is heard, Ramsey’s screen goes to static, and another gun blast takes out a window. When the window gets blown to pieces, the camera gives a mild jerk. I like it, gives the gunshot a nice extra punch. Thompson’s equipment confirms from audio that the gun is a .357 Magnum. Since the type of gun never enters into anything, I’d say that this is a Magnum P.I. in-joke. **shrug** Fair enough. Selleck’s immediate response is, “The bastard.” Hee hee. Cool! Ramsey decides to go in to rescue to kid, saying that a disarm robot would be no good because it would get shot just like the floater. He orders no audio, no radio, no talk, nothing that the robot could pick up. The AFC East might wanna try that when they travel to Foxboro.
Disarm robot? What are those like? None of the robots in this movie ever show any great speed or maneuverability, so I don’t see how a robot is gonna disarm someone/something that doesn’t want to be disarmed.
Ramsey approaches the grieving husband, a plain-looking electrical engineer, to get some info. Ramsey asks if any modifications were made to the robot. The husband gives an exaggerated “How should I know? You think I would know?” answer. Ramsey asks how the robot got the gun, and the movie makes a huge dramatic error. The hubby looks dazed and says, “He’s crazy. Omigod, he’s crazy,” then he starts running around shouting “No television! No pictures!” This is an error because rather than giving us a mystery for Ramsey to solve with his police skills, the movie gives him (and us) a give-away that this isn’t just a malfunctioning robot. Someone is behind this. And seconds later, we see the very villain himself. Gene Simmons calmly strolls onto the scene (did the cops not cordon the place off?) and glares. His glare alone pegs him as the villain, because he does look pretty wicked when he does that. (In Simmons’ autobiography, he says that Crichton casted him in this movie solely on his ability to project evil with his eyes. That’s likely why that’s pretty much all he does in this movie.)
So this scene unnecessarily reveals that there is a villain behind this, and ten seconds later unnecessarily reveals his identity. Neither of those are relevant to the scene and will be re-revealed later anyway. Sloppy!
While Ramsey suits up in believable-looking combat gear (Kevlar vest, boots, some kind of chain mail one-piece), the newswoman bugs him again, asking him if it’s true that’s he’s going into the house. Ramsey aloofly tells her that the robot is picking up everything she’s saying. She gets the point and withdraws. This commentary on the press is much less dated. Who can forget Geraldo Rivera blabbing to the world the location of US divisions early in the Iraq War? Or the San Francisco press running with new info about the Zodiac killer’s M.O., which led him to change M.O. and enabled him to kill a few more people? So this bit isn’t too bad, especially because you seldom see it in Hollywood. Usually the only time Hollywood cares about journalistic lack of ethics is when the one of their own are the victim of it.
Ramsey tests his laser pistol once and enters the house.
Action Scene 2
The music becomes the standard stealth score: Single high keyboard note drawn out. Ramsey creeps up against a wall, looks around the room, and repeats from room to room. The newswoman’s cameraman follows Ramsey in. Ramsey gives a few get-outta-here-dammit gestures, but seeing that the cameraman ain’t gonna leave, he forgets about it and gets on the with the job. Kinda silly that after putting on all that protective equipment, Ramsey isn’t wearing any headgear.
Suddenly a shot rings out, and the cameraman collapses face-down to the floor. The one close-up of his corpse shows some blood on his arm, but other than that, there’s no evidence anything happened to him. Ramsey, who hit the deck of his own accord when the shot rang out, puts a hand on the dead fellow’s shoulder blade. If he’s looking for a pulse, he’s looking in the wrong place. So it looks like a sympathetic sorry-you-got-killed thing. Bizarre, especially if he got killed because the movie doesn’t like journalists.
He follows the child’s cries until he can see him in the next room. Continuity error when we hear a chock-chock of a shotgun just before a pair of fist-sized holes get blasted into the wall. That ain’t no .357 Magnum, nor do we ever see a shotgun in this scene. Another error follows when Ramsey fires a couple laser shots around the corner before ducking into the room he just shot into, even though the angle of the holes in the wall make it clear that the robot must be 90 degrees away from where Ramsey is going. So what was he shooting at?
Ramsey crouches in a corner of the master bedroom. A door on the other side of the bed opens. A bullet explodes a pillow (feathers everywhere!), and Ramsey shoots the robot from under the bed, then twice quickly from over the bed. The robot is damaged by the lasers and sorta shuffles in place whirring. Ramsey approaches it, deactivates it, and calmly says, “I’m comin’ out with the kid.” He picks up the kid, who mellowed out pretty quickly considering all the shooting he’d just been screaming his head off about, and takes him outside, where the assembled crowd gives him heartfelt applause. Thompson tells Ramsey that the father disappeared. Ramsey is incredulous that the father left when his own kid was inside. I’m incredulous that he was able to leave at all. I guess the cops weren’t suspicious when he ran away screaming. End action scene 2.
I liked that scene. It was about 5 minutes long, so it was taking its time, letting the suspense build. The contrast between its serious tone and the lighthearted tone of the scene in the cornfields is catchy, and Selleck plays it well. It’s a good solid exciting scene. The only goofy things about it are that once the robot is neutralized, we can see that it’s holding a handgun (.357 or not, I can’t tell). So where were those shotgun blasts coming from? And the robot is indeed only knee-high, so its killing of two people with a knife is still unlikely. The robot’s arm doesn’t look too maneuverable either.
On the other hand, Ramsey’s laser gun is only seen clearly once, and it looks like it might be just a mace canister with a telephone cord attached to it for that 80s futuristic look. It’s only one shot though, and the laser gun is never used again in the movie, so it’s no biggie. I like its sound effect, though. Not a p-dow sound or a chew sound, it’s more like a high-pitched zzzt sound. I also like the understated “I’m comin’ out with the kid.” Much more believable and much more likable than the standard smart-ass post-kill witty one-liner.
Cut to the Ramsey house, where a 12-year-old kid watches the TV replay of the rescue. This is Ramsey’s son, Bobby. Ramsey and Thompson enter, and the kid gives his pop major props for a bit until pop and the robot maid named Lois send him to bed. On the one hand, the kid’s lines are believable enough. On the other hand, they’re believable for a 6-year-old rather than a 12-year-old. I can see a 6-year-old shooting off wide-eyed rapid-fire lines like, “That was neat! Were you scared? How come the father ran away?” But from a 12-year-old, it’s jarring.
With the kid out of the way, the movie gives us clunky character exposition and some well-delivered but mawkish Crichtonesque commentary on technology. Ramsey exposits that his wife died in a car crash. Translation: He and Thompson are gonna hook up. Thanks, movie. Never woulda guessed.
The character of Lois the maid robot is a boxish waist-high robot who speaks with a semi-robotic voice, like an automated voice on the telephone. She says that Bobby did well in school today, he’s eating a chocolate bar now, and that she will verify that he brushes his teeth. Ramsey is unhappy that she gave Bobby hot dogs for dinner again. Thompson talks about the maid robot she grew up with, an earlier model that burned every dinner it tried to make. So obviously the movie is saying that technology is a bad substitute for flesh-and-blood parenting. No s**t, Mr. Crichton, rhymes with Bitchton. Once again, it’s well-delivered, but it’s kinda insulting that Crichton would figure that audiences need him to point this sort of thing out.
Little bit of humor when Thompson makes to depart and the Lois can’t tell if Thompson’s talking to her or Ramsey.
In Bobby’s bedroom, Bobby asks pop if he likes Thompson, if Thompson is married, and if Dad wants to remarry. Just like the acrophobia bit, there’s no reason for this to be in here. We know there’s a romance angle just by looking at them, so it doesn’t need to be broadcast any more than that. Luckily, Selleck acts it well and the kid ain’t too bad neither. Just as he’s about to leave the room (I hate that), Bobby asks if Lois would ever go crazy like the robot pop disarmed. Ramsey says uh-uh, but after he leaves the bedroom, he stares pensively at Lois for a moment. End scene.
Future aesthetics rundown: At this point, it’s clear that this movie takes place in the near future rather than the far future, even if no exact year is given.* Minus the robots and a few futuristic touches to familiar devices and vehicles, everything looks very present-day; the vehicles, the houses, the interior decorating of Ramsey’s home, the police uniforms, etc. This is a good thing. Crichton has a point he wants to make with Runaway about the relationship between man and his technology. Making Runaway seem ultra-futuristic might’ve rendered it indistinguishable from movies that look futuristic just be neato; and by keeping the setting in the near future rather than far future, Crichton is signaling that this future we’re seeing on the screen is probably within our lifetimes, so the message shouldn’t be casually dismissed.
[ * - Thompson’s mention of the maid robot she had while growing up is the only indication in the movie that these robots have been around for a while and are not new inventions.]
As for the aesthetics of the robots themselves: Of course, the notion of these square boxish robots with robotic voices seems laughable today. However, that and the soundtrack are the only really dated aspects of the movie. Maybe Crichton figured that this is how robots would be in the real future. Or maybe Crichton figured otherwise but sensed that his message would be better felt by the audience if the robots looked plenty inhuman. The robots don’t have eyes or ears or mouths. They’re just ambulatory boxes.
**shrug** Technophobes.
Where was I?
Back at Ramsey’s workspace, Sgt. James is examining the innards of the murderous robot. He finds a chip inside that isn’t part of the standard model. He identifies it as noncommercial but very sophisticated, and he and Ramsey conclude that this robot was modified, despite the owner (the father who fled the scene) denying any knowledge of any modifications. Before they can get any further, the chip starts smoking, Sgt. James yells “We’ve got a dense pack! Floor!”* Everyone hits the deck, and the chip explodes. Cut to the adjacent office, where Chief looks up from whatever he’s doing to see the chaos, mumbles, “Assholes,” and goes back to whatever he was doing. It’s funny, you see. I don’t like it. It only reminds us of Police Academy, having him do this mild comic bit.
[ * - Computer wizards, it’s that an actual phrase, “dense pack?”]
Regaining his feet, James identifies the chip as a “monodichromate* dense pack. The arson special,” concluding that this robot was not a runaway, it was programmed to murder. This is what I meant about the distraught father saying “Omigod, he’s crazy” earlier. Thanks to that pointless bit, this scene is not telling us anything new. We already knew it was a murder. Sloppy movie.
[ * - Monodichromate. Mono- meaning one. Di- meaning two. Chrom- meaning color. Why do I get the feeling that that’s a nothing word?
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 11/03/2007 : 3:40:09 PM
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Jack gets called out of the room to handle another runaway, and we get called to handle another timewasting scene. We cut to a construction site where a robot on the 18th floor of a building under construction is “stacking where there’s no place to stack,” essentially dropping bags of…something, cement I suppose… down to street level. Ramsey, Thompson, and the lady forewoman barely flinch when a sack lands less than six feet from them, sending a cloud of white powder everywhere and reminding the audience that someone should’ve given the cops hard hats before entering the construction area.
Ramsey is uncomfortable. He tries to cop out by asking why the crew doesn’t shut it off themselves, and is told that their insurance doesn’t cover it (I find that unlikely, but I’m no expert). Thompson, sensing Ramsey’s discomfort, offers to do it herself. He agrees, and she goes up and turns the thing off easy as pie. The movie oughta be embarrassed that this is two scenes in a row that would’ve told us something interesting if it hadn’t already been told with total clunkiness earlier. The entire purpose of this scene is to establish Ramsey’s acrophobia. It’s already been done! And the hell of it is that without the early exposition, this would’ve been a good effective scene, because Selleck plays it well. You can tell he’s not comfortable, but it’s not hamfistedly obvious.
As they leave, the movie comes as close as it will to preaching. Thompson asks Ramsey if he thinks it’s better with robots doing the work rather than people. Ramsey says yes, explaining that “Nothing works right. Relationships don’t work right. People don’t work right. People make machines, so why should machines be perfect?” Ooo, fatalism. Thompson’s answer, “Because they’re machines,” is totally out of character for someone whose very job is to disable machines that don’t work right, even if she is new to the job.
Back at the house where Ramsey rescued the kid, the police investigation is proceeding. Ramsey and Thompson arrive, although with the case now being murder rather than a runaway, you’d think the case would be handed off entirely. **shrug** Props to the movie for having Ramsey ask one of the investigators, “Is it clean in here?” before touching anything. Nice little bit o’ realism. Ramsey turns on the…front door video answering machine, I guess. Someone shows up, no one is home, so they leave a message. I remember watching this as a kid, I felt certain that this was the Runaway technology that was most likely to become commonplace first. Hasn’t happened yet, and that’s a surprise.
The first message is an uninteresting friend just saying hi, the second is an uncomfortable looking dude in suit and tie who wants the father (the guy who fled the scene) to meet him quickly! It’s important! The third is Gene Simmons. He introduces himself as being from Acme Robot Repairs (Good God, cantcha come up with a better name than that?), responding to a call that a robot was malfunctioning. He gets no further, because the rest of the message has been erased. This gets Ramsey interested in finding out who this guy is. End scene.
The message was partially erased? Assuming it was erased by someone who wanted it erased, why wouldn’t it be erased entirely?
We cut to a research lab of some kind. Gene Simmons, wearing a white cover-all, is telling another similarly clad dude, a henchman, that he’s delighted and ecstatic at whatever he was just looking at in the microscope.
I’m guessing that this shot was originally a bit longer, because we immediately cut to an office where both men are in suits. We finally get a name for Simmons’ character. He is Dr. Luther. His henchman is quailing before him like an Imperial officer before Lord Vader. Henchman gives Luther a sheet of computer chips, says that they’re dangerous to handle, and asks who would find these chips valuable. That’s a bizarre question from someone who knows what the chips do and presumably had a hand in their design. But it gives Luther the chance to calmly exposit for the audience that he can sell them to “the Mafia, terrorist organizations, foreign agents, anybody who will pay me enough money for them.” When Luther asks for the rest of the chips and the templates to make more of them, henchman says they’re locked away somewhere, and he’ll give them to Luther after Luther pays him for his services. Luther produces a briefcase containing the payment.
Then we get silly. A noise outside the office causes henchman to shout, “Sentry on rounds!” and then he scurries to the windowed door and watches the waist-high robot roll on past. If he doesn’t want the sentry to spot him, why does he dash to the door? Since the robot is waist-high, I don’t see how it’s gonna see him if he doesn’t.
When he turns around, Luther is gone. Vanished. After a moment of confusion, henchman gleefully opens the suitcase only to find that it’s the standard stacks-of-random paper-with-one-bill-on-top gag. He slams the suitcase shut angrily, and then the selling point shows up. A robotic spider crawls out from under…whatever it was under. Cool! Three cheers for the robotic spider! It leaps on the henchman, causing him to panic. It sticks a needle into the underside of his jaw, then explodes, setting henchman on fire. The mannequin used to simulate henchman flambé is really obvious. From the hallway, the father who ran from the scene of his baby’s rescue looks nervously into the room then walks away. Intrigue!
The robotic spiders are like the metal dinosaurs in The Empire Strikes Back. They’re a totally inefficient design for what they’re supposed to do in this fictional universe, the don’t have much to do with the plot, but they look so wicked-cool that it’s all good. I want one of those to decorate my office.
I also gotta note that Simmons keeps this oily smug look on his face throughout this scene. As it turns out, he’ll keep it on for the entire movie. You’ve seen photos of Kiss during the mid/late 80s sans makeup? That sneer on his face? That’s what I mean. He keeps in on from start to finish here.
Back to Ramsey and Thompson. They’ve tracked down father-who-fled (FWF, henceforth) to a downtown hotel and are ready to move in. Unknown to them, Dr. Luther is also on-scene. Ramsey collars FWF rather easily (especially given that he conducted to raid himself with no assistance!) and leads him outside despite FWF ranting that he can’t go outside. Once they get to the squad car, FWF spots Luther drawing a weapon and takes off running.
Action Scene 3
Either not noticing or not caring that someone was drawing a weapon, Ramsey takes off in pursuit through the alleys (This was filmed in downtown Vancouver, but the movie never does state which city this is. That’s okay, because it doesn’t matter). Due to poor editing, we see FWF turn a corner, Ramsey make to turn the same corner literally one second later, only to almost get plowed over by a big-rig that leaves no room at all between itself and the corner FWF just turned. So it’s almost as if FWF transformed into a big-rig. More than meets the [SPLAT!!!]. As the chase goes on, I don’t see how the big-rig even got there in the first place. They run through alleys filled with boxes and crates and tubes and barrels and debris. There are also a few vehicles, but I’ll be damned if I can figure how they get in or out of there.
Eventually, Ramsey catches up to him. Finally, a chase scene where the pursuer actually catches the pursuee simply by outrunning him! It’s so understated it’s outrageous. Unfortunately, Selleck’s own understatedness works against this scene. He gently pushes FWF against the wall while giving a too-mild “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I don’t think Selleck would’ve lost points with his fans had he been a little more realistic and rough with FWF.
Suddenly, Luther off-screen teleports to the end of the alley. How he knew where they’d be, I don’t know. He fires a bullet from his futuristic-looking handgun. The bullet zips past Ramsey, who turns to watch it, then it turns around and explodes right over FWF’s head. FWF takes off running again. Ridiculously, Ramsey opts to pursue FWF rather than whoever’s doing the shooting. By the way, Thompson seems to have disappeared.
Luther fires another bullet, and we get bullet POV as it zooms through a length of pipe, and around corners as Ramsey flees. The seam between the POV shot in the pipe and the POV once the bullet exits the pipe is not as good as it could’ve been. The bullet follows Ramsey for a good ten seconds and Ramsey not-quite-runs around corners and stuff, constantly glancing behind him the whole way. But the bullet eventually sails past him and catches up to FWF, who takes the bullet right in the back. Then he turns into the movie’s second unconvincing mannequin and dies. End Action Scene 3.
That scene wasn’t terribly remarkable, but it did introduce the guided bullets into the movie. This is a fairly creative idea, and one that could form the central plot element of a very interesting movie. The laughable part of the scene of course is Ramsey outrunning a bullet while not even running that hard, but it actually holds up. Obviously, the guided bullets couldn’t travel at the speed of ordinary bullets, else the audience wouldn’t’ve seen them move and wouldn’t get what had just happened. So the guided bullets had to be slow enough to be visible. I can allow that, especially since if such things existed for real, they probably would be slower, otherwise they’d need a football field’s worth of room just to execute a 90-degree turn, and that would kill their usefulness. So it’s a good decision for the movie to keep them slower, especially as the movie holds itself to it. Throughout the movie, all the guided bullets travel slower than ordinary bullets. No sweat.
The coda of the chase scene is retarded, though. Ramsey approaches FWF’s face-down corpse. Despite FWF having a fist-sized smoking hole is his back, Ramsey checks the guy’s neck for a pulse. Good God. Then we cut to Thompson and another lady cop, the latter of whom is constructing a portable digital sketch-art of Luther based on Thompson’s description. While this too is interesting technology that already exists to some degree or other, it’s totally irrelevant because Thompson already saw the guy from the video answering machine at the house after Ramsey saved the kid. So why is she even consulting a sketch artist? She know precisely what the guy looks like, and knows precisely where an image of him can be found. And there’s also the matter of why Thompson wasn’t going after Luther when she had the chance. She saw FWF flee from Luther, and she stayed behind when Ramsey gave chase. So why wasn’t she going after Luther? My guess is that Crichton didn’t think about that because this scene was just to show off another gadget of his.
Having identified FWF as Johnson, an electronic engineer at Vectrocon, Ramsey and Thompson pay a visit to Vectrocon to see what they can find about him. Ramsey submits to a retinal identification scan that’s a lift of Star Trek II, there’s some believable shop talk just for texture, and the computer recites Johnson’s unremarkable file. There’s another brief computer-thinks-everyone’s-talking-to-it bit that goes down easy because Selleck plays it well, but we’ve already had one such scene so it’s kinda stupid.
Time for a few Cinematic Implausible Coincidences. Thompson gets a runaway alert from inside that very building! In the security shack, Ramsey watches via security camera as a secretary named Jackie (Kirstie Alley) is…menaced, I guess…by a sentry robot and yelling with irritation for someone to get her out of there. That’s pretty much all Alley does in this movie is yell. That’s not good, because listening to Kirstie Alley yell is only slightly less irritating than listen to Fran Drescher talk.
Anyway, the sentry robot is blocking her egress by giving low-voltage shocks. When Ramsey sees her on his screen, he is struck by how pretty she is (and she definitely is smokin’ hot, no doubt!). He goes into his Magnum, P.I.-style on-turning of the charm, as Thompson looks on with envy.
The next two minutes are Ramsey trying to impress Jackie with his confident and effortless disarming of the robot. It’s played lightheartedly, sometimes failing (Ramsey getting tossed to the floor by a zap right after telling Jackie that he knows what he’s doing, yuk yuk), but mostly it works (his “I’m fine” after getting tossed is delivered perfectly), and it ends with him comically bashing the robot repeatedly with a chair.
He offers Jackie a ride home, while she declines and just wants to get out of there. She just happens to bump into the now-smashed robot, spilling computer chips out it’s…secret compartment, I guess. Ramsey recognizes them as similar to the chip that modified the house robot that he disarmed earlier. What luck. Rather than plead ignorance like you’d think she would do, she immediately starts blabbing an unsolicited confession that even Murder, She Wrote wouldn’t try to sell us on. She says, without anyone even asking her, that they’re Luther’s chips and that Luther will kill her if she doesn’t get them back to him just like he killed the others.
It’s almost as if the movie started out wanting to be a mystery but changed its mind after it already started. Not a whole lot of sleuthing left for Police Sergeant Ramsey to do, is there? I hope he feels grateful. Real cops would be envious. Hell, even most movie cops would be envious. The who, what, and how have just been spelled out for him without him doing any inquiries at all.
Realizing that she hasn’t given away the “where” part yet and all he has to do is ask, he does. She gives away that Luther’s at The Ritz Hotel. Christ. First “Acme Robot Repairs,” now “The Ritz Hotel.”
At the Ritz Hotel, Ramsey has gotten a stakeout in place. Again, if he’s on the runaway squad, why is he even still involved here? Shouldn’t this have been handed off to Homicide or whatever? Ramsey takes the point position and creeps into Luther’s suite.
Gratuitous boob shot here. Either my memory sucks or I don’t consciously appreciate the advances made in implant technology; because before watching this thing now, I could’ve sworn that the British booby lady had massive Kilamanjaros. In fact, I remember talking about this movie with a classmate in 7th grade at Northwood Junior High School, Spokane, Washington, 1985, and we both were blown away by her mammoth mammaries. But now, they look rather pedestrian. Modern teens watching this would probably think, “C’mon, if you’re gonna give us tits, give us TITS!!!”
Ramsey and Thompson burst in the main room with guns drawn. Luther, two Shady Suited Guys, and a Token Hot Chick (played by the future-Mrs. Michael Crichton) are all under arrest! But crafty Luther sneers up at a floater on the ceiling, which descends to eye level and spews smoke all over the room, facilitating his escape. Whether this smoke is incapacitating like tear gas or just fog to hide in is unclear, because some cops double over coughing while Thompson, Ramsey, and Luther seem just fine. Luther whips out his guided bullet pistol and shoots Thompson in the arm, shoots and kills both of his business associates, and fends of Ramsey by using Mrs. Crichton as a human shield. The fending-off is not very convincing because we only see Luther and his shield from the shoulders up, and it’s clear from the angle of her head that she’s not quite in front of him, so Ramsey actually has a fairly easy shot.
Luther escapes through the halls of the hotel. For some reason, he still holds the lady in front of him, and the cops who shout “Hold it!” from behind don’t shoot when they have the chance. Luther dispatches them both, so we can see bullets fly around corners again. He also keeps his rockstar grin on his face, like he’s enjoying the poop out of this. Ramsey tries to pursue him up the stairwell but is overcome with vertigo when he looks down the stairwell and the camera spins around, the whole bit. For the only time in the movie, Selleck overacts. Staggering back against the wall and panting is a bit much, especially given that he’ll face much more immediate gravity-related peril later and have a lesser reaction to it. **shrug** Luther gets away in a waiting helicopter.
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 11/03/2007 : 3:41:07 PM
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Shortly after, the place is swarming with police. I guess in this universe cordons don’t exist, as the same presslady from the rescue scene is back again right there amongst the cops. Thompson is IV’d and on a stretcher, but is doing okay except for the bullet in her arm. Ramsey grabs an unused bullet that happens to be lying right there on a table, and goes to get yelled at by Chief. Chief cusses Ramsey out for doing this operation despite the lack of runaways on the scene and for the dead cops that resulted. I know nothing about this sort of thing, but how likely is it that a police stakeout would be executed without the chief knowing about it? Ramsey shows Chief the heat-seeking bullet, but Chief literally rolls his eyes at it.
When a medical robot arrives to remove the bullet from Thompson’s arm, Ramsey freaks out, saying that they screw up all the time. Then why are medical services in this movie using them? Ah! It’s so Ramsey can go ahead and remove the bullet himself. Yeah, never mind the medical personnel who are standing right there, Ramsey’s better qualified for this sort of thing. He screams a bunch of profanities that Selleck could never do on Magnum P.I., and that somehow convinces Chief to let him go ahead and try to remove the bullet.
So we’ve got two tropes going here: The Rogue Cop trope, with the variation that in this movie, the Chief seems to know all about the rogue-ing that this particular cop is doing; and the Do-It-All trope, where a movie’s hero can do anything the script requires of him even if it’s totally implausible that he be able to. This trope will continue until movie’s end.
The bullet-removal scene itself is bizarre because it runs just like a birth scene. Substitute Ramsey’s repeated “Hold still” with repeated “Push,” and you wouldn’t have to change a thing. You never see Thompson below the chest nor do you see what Ramsey’s looking at except for a couple brief glimpses of the x-ray monitor he’s using. Strange. And pointless. Like 90% of this movie’s running time, this scene has nothing at all to do with the plot. Props to Cynthia Thompson, though. She sells this scene fairly well.
Oh, and Ramsey removes the bullet without a hitch, and tosses it aside just before it explodes. How he knew it was about to explode, I have no idea.
Cut to a hospital waiting room, where Ramsey is glad to see Thompson doing okay. He asks her to come home with him for dinner. Initially, she’s delighted at the offer; but he oversells the just-between-coworkers line, her face falls, and she winds up rejecting the offer. This is what I liked about Magnum P.I.: Magnum does not always wow the ladies. Sometimes he screws up. Sometimes he makes a fool of himself. Sometimes he does everything right but still comes off differently than how he wanted to. I dug that, and I dig it here. It’s a key reason why a sex symbol like Selleck can be appealing to guys as well as ladies. And it doesn’t hurt that this is precisely the kind of role that Selleck plays best. So even though this scene telegraphs (as if any more telegraphing were needed) that the two of them are gonna hook up before too long, I like this scene anyway.
Back at Chez Ramsey, Lois the robot housekeeper tells him that the pasta will be al dente in 10 minutes. He dejectedly tells her to forget it. Hang on a sec, you mean Ramsey gave Lois instructions for dinner for two before he asked Thompson home? Confident fella!
He goes into Bobby’s room, and my stomach starts churning as I dread a father-son chat. Usually, father-son chats are cliché, stupid, and unrealistic. But Runaway catches me by surprise, because this chat is actually pretty fun. Bobby playfully turns the tables on his pop by telling him not to use profanity on TV again. They giggle about it, until Ramsey is paged back to the police station. Props to Joey Kramer, who plays Bobby (no relation to Joey Kramer, drummer for Aerosmith): He seems like he’s genuinely trying not to laugh at precisely the point where the character is supposed to be trying not to laugh. There’s just one problem with this: The profanity Bobby refers to is the screaming Ramsey was doing at the hotel before spontaneously becoming a surgeon and removing Thompson’s bullet. So this is still that same night? The stakeout itself was at night. We know, because we saw Luther on the roof in front of the night sky. So the stakeout went down, Ramsey removed the bullet, presumably called Lois with the dinner menu, went to the hospital to see that Thompson was all right, and still got home at what we can assume (by Lois still making the dinner) to be a reasonable hour? No way.
Back the cop shop, Ramsey and Sgt. James are examining the innards of a smart bullet. James is baffled, saying it’s a homing bullet but unsure what exactly it homes in on. He’s tried movement, light, and shape, all with no luck. Then he begins to light a cigarette, and the flame just happens to trigger…an alarm, I guess…from the bullet. You’d think he would already have thought of heat. Instead, it’s more dumb luck.
Somehow, he and Ramsey figure that each bullet is tailored to come after a specific person depending on that person’s own unique heat signature. How do they figure? For all they know, each bullet goes after whatever heat source it senses. Sgt. James punches a couple keys, and on screen pops his and Ramsey’s heat signatures. I get a headache just wondering how the individualized heat patterns of the members of the force would be near to hand. And this will also never come into play for the rest of the movie.
Then James does some Crichtonizing (There. I invented a word). He says, “This is a police nightmare. We should worry about terrorists and crooks getting A-bombs? The real problem is this microelectronics stuff.” Yeah, that and the designer dinosaurs, abuse of time travel, microbiological contagion, and ancient underwater stuff. crap, Mr. Crichton, is there anything we’re not supposed to s**t out pants about?!? Sgt. James also has determined that the odd chip on the house robot was designed to “turn any normal robot into a killer.”
Ramsey goes to see Chief, who’s got the file on Dr. Luther. His arrest record makes him out to be more of a street punk than a techowizard. Ramsey intends to use Jackie as bait for Luther, and Chief actually makes fun of Ramsey for thinking it might work! “Whoop-dee-doo!” he says. I don’t believe it! Then he tells Ramsey to see the police psychic.
Cut to the most pointless scene in a movie overflowing with pointless scenes. The psychic, a plain 50-ish lady intones that Luther and Ramsey will meet, they have a karmic bond, they were brothers in a past life, etc. Ramsey totally looks like he’s embarrassed to even be there. Probably wasn’t hard for Selleck to channel.
Later (this movie doesn’t convey the passage of time well at all), Sgt. James tells Ramsey that the chips they’ve found seem to have been mass-produced, implying the existence of templates. Then Ramsey gets a phone call from Luther. The guy who answers says, “You know someone named Luther?” This is retarded. The whole department oughta know someone named Luther, because they’re looking for him. We just heard Chief read his rap sheet a couple minutes ago, and they know he’s the one who killed two of their own. So Luther calling the cop shop and identifying himself is idiotic. When Ramsey picks up, Luther rattles him by revealing that he is monitoring the office by the TV monitor. The gist of his call is that he wants Jackie back. It’s weird-ass:
Luther: I want my girl back. I know she’s there. I want you to turn her over to me.
Ramsey: No way.
Luther: If you don’t, I’ll kill her.
I don’t know if Monty Python ever did any skits involving police hostage negotiation stand-offs, but that line is about what I’d imagine it’d be like. You can’t kill her yet, Luther, precise because you don’t have her. And incidentally, Simmons is unseen during this conversation, but his voice is as sneerful as his face. Audio-ham, thick-sliced.
After the call, Ramsey wonders aloud why Luther wants Jackie so badly. Thompson says that maybe she has the templates. If sounds like she’s just throwing the idea out there, but of course this will later turn out to be so. Ramsey goes to Jackie’s holding cell. Jackie yells and yells about Ramsey failing to catch Luther, and she yells and yells some more about no place being safe from Luther so Ramsey might as well not try to move her. Kristie Alley acts this very well, but goddamn, her voice is annoying.
Cut to the x-ray security machine (Of The Future! There, you knew that was comin’), through which Ramsey, Thompson, and Jackie have to pass to enter the police parking garage. Me neither. Ramsey and Thompson are clean. Jackie has a bug in her blouse, so she removes her blouse (This was long before Alley gained a truckload of weight, but her potential to do so is pretty clear seeing her in only a bra. This is hindsight of course. As a kid, I was slobbering all over myself). She has another in her bra so she turns her back to the camera to remove it. [Past Food: Goddammit!] She has some brutal-looking gashes on her back that never enter into anything. After removing more bugs from her knee-high skirt and high heels, she is now bug-free. None of this will come into play in the remainder of the movie. It was just there to tease us. Hell, movie, we’ll take frontal nudity of unknowns over partial frontal nudity of celebrities any day. Can I get an amen, folks?
They go into the parking lot, where Thompson takes the wheel of one cop car while Ramsey and Jackie take the back seat of a autopiloted cop car. Jackie bitches the whole time. The autopiloted car has a mannequin in the driver’s seat. I don’t know why.
A long shot of the cars cruising through the raised highways of Vancouver, with the beautiful just-after-sunset mountains in the background. Gorgeous! Jackie spots the silhouette of a helicopter overhead and exclaims, “It’s Luther!” How she can tell, I have no clue. Ramsey isn’t taking her seriously, either. He’s still acting all laid back. Due to sloppy editing, it seems to have gone from just after sunset to full night instantly.
Action Scene 4
Suddenly, a car behind them gives chase. Generic hoods inside the car open a floor panel and drop attack probes onto the road. These probes are flat rectangular things that zoom and weave around and under the cars in pursuit of our heroes (Ramsey gets a smile-worthy pun here). The first couple are dispatched by the roof-mounted laser gun from Thompson’s car (and she used to work in the Traffic division? Damn!). It’s kinda laughable that the drivers of the other cars on this semi-congested highway don’t seem to mind the lasers and explosions too much. No one swerves or anything. Maybe it’s common in this future, like in Car Wars. Remember that game? I always lost at it. Now I stick to Strat-O-Matic.
When six of the probes approach, Ramsey and Jackie jump into Thompson’s car; Ramsey via stuntman and Jackie via offscreen implication. The car they just vacated goes kaboom and veers off the road (Now I know why it had a mannequin in the front seat, so the visibility of the stunt driver doesn’t count as a goof). With the probes still coming after them, Ramsey wants to chuck Jackie’s purse out the window. Jackie pauses long enough to remove the something from the purse, then the purse gets chucked, the probes run into it and explode in a shower of sparks in front of a once-again-dusky sky. End Action Scene 4.
To me, this is the best scene in the movie. It must’ve been the most difficult scene in the movie to shoot, because filming from a moving vehicle is naturally tricky, and the probe POV shots as they weave among the cars and under the cars couldn’t’ve been easy either. Granted, the cars are not going that fast. Judging by the white lines in the road, I’d guesstimate that these cars are going no faster than 30 mph, and maybe slower. The probes themselves are a fairly imaginative twist for a car chase to have, they have a suitably malevolent appearance without being too much, they look realistic enough, they’re not matted in, I can’t see any wires or grooves in the road. The only big negative about the scene is the lack of any visual means of telling how close they are to their quarry or how fast they’re closing in; The movie gives a good try at mitigating that by giving us an audio means via a computer voice in the cop cars saying, “Multiple targets at fifty yards and closing. Conditions are dangerous,” etc. All in all, I don’t think a slow-speed chase has been this exciting since O.J. moseyed for his life in the Ford Bronco. This was a most cool scene!
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 11/03/2007 : 3:42:10 PM
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Having escaped okay, Ramsey says that now that they have the templates, it’s time to meet Luther in-person. I don’t get it. Luther wants the templates so he can mass-produce his robot-deranging chips, and Ramsey knows it. So why does Ramsey want to meet with him? He should want the templates as far away from Luther as possible. Whatever, movie. Cut to an outdoor sushi bar complete with waterfall. If I liked sushi, I’d wanna take a lady there, no doubt. (Sidenote: Am I the only person in the SF-Oakland area who does not like sushi?) Closeup of Ramsey sliding what looks like a simple sewing pin in among the folded templates. Jackie yells some more (#&$%!) that this is a stupid idea because Luther’s not gonna show up. Wrong, Jackie. It’s stupid because you and Ramsey shouldn’t’ve shown up. There’s no reason to! Although I can’t fault her for believing that Luther won’t show up. How in the world would Luther know to come there? We saw Jackie debugged earlier, so he couldn’t’ve tracked her. Ramsey couldn’t trace Luther’s call earlier, so Ramsey couldn’t’ve called him back to arrange the meeting. This is idiotic. Ramsey is still trying to be casual-charming, saying the sushi looks delicious and she had the tekki maki.
Suddenly, Ramsey hears Luther in the earpiece he’s wearing. Scanning the dining area, he sees Luther sitting with Thompson. He’s discreetly holding his gun on Thompson and says that Thompson “was kind enough to lend me her headset.” Waitaminit, he captured Thompson? Again, how did he even know where they would be? Luther and Ramsey quibble a bit, then agree to exchange Thompson for Jackie and the templates. Minor blooper of Jackie lighting a cigarette dangling (and I mean dangling!) from her mouth, then cut to a different angle and she’s already got it lit and holding it in her hand. Jackie gives half of the templates to Ramsey before rejoining Luther (“My insurance policy,” she says). Waitaminit, Ramsey was gonna just let Jackie give all the templates to Luther? What kind of strategy is that? As Thompson and Jackie pass each other, I notice that Jackie is dressed in Evil Black and Thompson is dressed in Good White. Clunky.
Jackie gives the chips to Luther and kisses him. The camera cuts to Ramsey just before lip contact, so I wonder if Alley had a beef with kissing Gene Simmons, or verse vica. Luther sneers at the templates, drives a blade into Jackie’s neck, and drops her into the pool. Some insurance policy, Jackie. Shoulda switched to Geico and saved 50% or more. Hilariously, none of the diners in this full-to-capacity restaurant pay any notice at all despite the loud splash. Ramsey is equally low-key, merely asking “What’s the matter, is something wrong?” Luther has noticed that these aren’t all the templates, and he shoots a pair of heat-seekers at Ramsey. The first explodes on a table he overturns, and the second seems to explode among a table of four. And still none of the diners take any notice at all. For example, look at the guy in white on the left at 1:15:01. A chef, looks like. He ain’t paying attention at all. It’s like in Space Mutiny when McPherson shoots the dudes at the table while the still-unshot dudes keep doing whatever they’re doing without even looking up.
Mass civic disinterest in public murder enables Luther to escape by leaping off the waterfall and stalking away. By stalking, I mean that Simmons seems to be in Kiss persona for this one brief shot. It’s only two seconds, from 1:15:14 to 1:15:16, but he’s got his evil grin on his face and his arms held as if he’s holding a big invisible beach ball in front of his crotch. Ramsey, Thompson, and two uniformed cops (where were they during all this?) take the long way to the bottom of the waterfall, don’t see Luther anywhere, and give up the chase on the spot. Not very gung-ho, are they?
In Chief’s office, Ramsey tells Chief to relax because he planted a bug on Luther (I wanna work for a guy like Chief. He lets Ramsey pull operations out of his ass and implement them then and there). We saw the bug, and it was pretty unsubtle. A sewing needle thing placed on the very thing Luther wanted. Yeah, he’ll never be suspicious. As if on cue, Thompson enters and says they’ve traced the bug to City Hospital.* Uh, shouldn’t they have begun tracking as soon as the bug was planted?
[ * - Acme Robot Repairs, Ritz Hotel, and now City Hospital. Three strikes, you’re out.]
At the hospital, there are over a dozen cops with shotguns there. Even so, Ramsey takes the lead position to enter the restroom where Luther is. But ho ho, he’s not there! The bug has been stuck into a roll of toilet paper. Ramsey tells a pretty redhead lady cop with the biggest Sally Jesse Raphael glasses I’ve ever seen to do the usual crime-scene analysis, and he and everyone else leave save one guy to guard the door in case anyone has to take a piss and mess up the scene. She tries to concentrate on the job, but is distracted by a mechanical sound whose location she can’t pinpoint. It’s a robospider, crawling up the wall and ceiling to seal her doom! It’s must be doing the mechanical equivalent of throwing its voice if the lady can’t tell where the sound is coming from. It drops onto her shoulder, and she screams in horror. It’s not packing any punch with me anymore because she’s obviously holding the thing onto her shoulder herself. Let go, and the thing would fall harmlessly to the floor. **shrug** It needles her under the chin, and her screaming cuts off instantly as her face goes slack. Must be powerful stuff in the spider’s needle if it works that fast. The one cop assigned to the door rushes to assist, but the spider explodes, throwing him across the room. He slumps to the floor motionless despite the fact that only his legs are on fire.
That scene was just all around goofy. By the way, if you’ve ever wondered what the Psycho attack music sounds like in 80s synth, this scene is your chance to find out.
Cut to the police office, where Luther has donned a cop uniform and glides unnoticed through the department. Eat my ass. He’s killed a bunch of cops, everyone knows his name and face, and he’s just strolling through the department? Fecal. He puts a fake eyelid up to the retinal identification scanner, and Ramsey personal file comes up, complete with address. Garbage. When I log into my workspace computer, it doesn’t give a mini-bio, it simply says “Good morning, Food.” The camera focuses on a picture of his son so we know what Luther’s got in mind.
Seconds or minutes or hours later, Ramsey enters the office and yells at Chief for the stake-out having gone awry. I don’t know why he’s taking it out on Chief. It was Ramsey’s idea to place the bug in the first place, it was Ramsey who lead the stake-out into the men’s room, and Chief himself wasn’t even there. So what’s Ramsey bitchin’ about? Thompson notices that Jack’s computer is still displaying his bio complete with pic of his son. What, Luther didn't bother logging off so no one would suspect anything? Ramsey tries to call home, the phone’s busy, so he hurries out.
Arriving home, he finds Lois a broken mess. He and Thompson try to patch Lois up enough to speak, while they talk about Lois as if it was a human. Message, Mr. Crichton? Lois eventually says that Bobby was taken by someone who forced their way into the house. The phone rings, and it’s Luther. “If you wanna see your boy alive,” etc. He actually says that. Ramsey says ok and makes to leave. Thompson wants to come, Ramsey says no, Luther said alone; Thompson promises she won’t try to follow, Ramsey thinks “Bulls**t,” and leaves without telling her where he’s going. Once Ramsey’s gone, Thompson returns to trying to patch up Lois. Somehow, and without even trying, she manages to get Lois to replay both ends of the phone conversation, revealing to Thompson where Ramsey is going. Gee, that was convenient. Wonder where this is going.
Cut to a skyscraper construction site. Naturally. After all that build-up of Ramsey’s acrophobia, the movie can’t just drop it now. Although how Luther knew about his acrophobia is never explained. Was that in his mini-bio too? I hope Luther doesn’t log into my mini-bio and finds out what I’m afraid of. A half dozen or so robospiders lie in wait. On closed-circuit TV, Luther tells Ramsey that the spiders won’t hurt him and to get on the elevator. Bobby says, “Dad? Are you coming to get me?” His tone of voice is that of a kid after a soccer game after all the other kids have been picked up by their folks.
Ramsey gets on the elevator and ascends. Selleck now gets about 30 seconds to try to act out of his range. He supposed to be forcing down the acrophobia that grips him as the open-cage elevator (it’s for robots) ascends high into the night sky. It ain’t Vertigo, that’s for sure. On the other hand, this isn’t easy, acting terrified of something that isn’t actually there. And the height really isn’t actually there, as the view from the elevator is realized by mattes. Admittedly, very good mattes (the darkness helps in that regard), but still. Selleck doesn’t quite succeed, but he gives it his best shot.
The elevator stops at the top of the building, where robots continue to work and sparks fly everywhere. Luther stands a fair distance away, holding onto Bobby. At this point, a first-time viewer will be disgustedly thinking that the kid is gonna save the day by either biting Luther’s hand or by a flash of adult insight and/or skill that puts the adults to shame. Happily, that doesn’t happen. Ramsey shouts at Luther to release Bobby now, and Luther smirkingly does. Ramsey tells Bobby to get outta here. His “Stay away from the edge” is a nice touch. Once Bobby begins his descent, Luther gloats that the robots will attack Bobby as soon as he reaches ground level. “They’ll let you in, but they won’t let you out!” Ramsey freaks out and runs to the edge. The shot of the elevator descending is just a mirror image of a shot less than a minute ago of the elevator ascending. Ramsey screams for Bobby to stop the elevator. Bobby must have super-hearing because he hears Ramsey from ten or more floors away and with the humming of the elevator, no less. The buttons don’t work! Is this the end for a little kid in a big-budget Hollywood production? Judging by the look on Bobby’s face, he already knows the answer. He don’t look too worried.
He’s right. Thompson arrives at that moment and whisks Bobby away (Nice leg shot here. Cynthia Thompson had a strict no-nude-scenes policy throughout her career, so I guess the movie is coming as close as it can). I guess the spiders were stymied by having someone entering and someone exiting at the same time and they took an aracho-vote on it. I’m stymied by how Thompson knew what to do with Bobby. She had no way of knowing the spiders were gonna kill him. Thompson and Bobby scramble up the scaffolding to the second floor. Then Thompson hits an elevator call button, and the thing starts ascending. Uh, I hope Bobby fills her in on them spiders before they try to get on there.
Back on top, Luther starts firing heat-seekers at Ramsey. Ramsey does the standard Action Hero bit, leaping behind stuff, opening steam valves, and not getting hit by bullets. The elevator returns to his floor. Okay, that’s what Thompson was doing. Fair enough. Ramsey dives in and hits the down button, but the elevator shoots up, up, up beyond the top of the building and to the very top of its own supports. Another 20 seconds of Selleck trying to convey panic. The matte shots are still good, except the one from 1:28:26 to 1:28:28.
He tries the buttons to no avail. A tiny screen says that there’s a system failure, and the reset button is located on the underside of the elevator, which can be accessed by the maintenance hatch. He makes to open it, but three robospiders crawl into view. I guess they hitched a ride on the underside of the thing and weren’t dislodged by the abrupt halt of the elevator that jarred Ramsey to the floor.
Action Scene 5
Ramsey removes his jacket. Two of the spiders leap at Ramsey’s head and cling to the metal grate that forms the walls of the cab. On opposite sides of his head, they both shoot acid in his face. Instead of screaming in agony unholy like he should, he just shakes his head a bit, like someone who has just poured ice water in his face to wake himself up. Doesn’t make a sound. Ramsey must be one tough snuffleupabitch. Dumbass movie. Selleck wears burn make-up to simulate acid burns from here on in, but sfx are no substitute for good acting.
The third spider leaps at him, but he catches it in his jacket and kicks it off the elevator. It explodes as it begins its plummet to the street. I don’t know why, but…**shrug**…look out below, I guess.
Ramsey then does his single most counterintuitive act in the whole movie. Realizing that he’s not gonna get to the maintenance hatch as long as the spiders are there, he swings himself to the outside of the elevator cab, holding onto the metal mesh and avoiding the spiders. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Even if he wasn’t an acrophobe, this would be a stretch. Since he is, it’s just too implausible. Sorry, movie. He should be much more willing to try to take out the spiders from inside the cab than to venture outside the cab. **shrug** Maybe there was a deleted scene establishing him as an arachnophobe, too.
Now on the opposite side of the grate-wall from the spiders, he dislodges one simply by slapping the grate where it clings. The spiders falls to the floor, and bounces like a Superball right out of the cab, exploding like it’s breathen as it plummets. As he watches it fall, the last remaining spider (who Ramsey could’ve done away with by the exact same means) needles him in the hand. How did it do that? The spiders’ needles are in their “heads” and project parallel to the surface they’re standing on. This spider stabs Ramsey in what from the spiders perspective is a downward direction. Towards the “floor,” which is a wall to us humans. Whatever.
Ramsey gives a shout (acid-burned cheeks don’t bother him, but a pinprick in the hand does), and loses his grip. Through sloppy editing, it looks like he falls a bit too far to catch the…pipe or beam or whatever that is…but he catches it anyway. Sloppy. Then he manages to hang on by one hand for five full seconds. Despite the spur-of-the-moment catch and resultant less-than-optimal grip. Anal blood.
Then he hangs on by both hands for 20 seconds. Anal blood Part II: The Revenge.
Then he realizes that the audience just isn’t buying his ability to hang for dear life for so long, so he swings toward the poles up which the elevator travels (dislodging an electric wire of some kind in the process) and hooks his legs around it. Now that’s better. Shoulda done that in the first place. Woulda been better still if his legs weren’t still out of the shot when he does.
As he’s fiddling with the maintenance panel on the underside of the cab, the last spider crawls out to say hi. Ramsey grabs the wire he just dislodged, touches it to the spider, and down it goes. With the spiders taken care of, Ramsey resets the elevator to work properly, and it begins its descent. Ramsey hangs on the underside for 20 solid seconds while trying to pull himself up through the hatch and back into the cab. Absolute rubbish. End Action Scene 5.
In a vacuum, that scene was so-so. In the context of an acrophobe in the worst of spots with acid-shooting spiders after him as well, it flat-out f**kin’ sucked. First, the spiders were dispatched so easily that they lost their sense of menace. Second, Ramsey’s acrophobia pretty much vanishes once the spiders show up. Third, and as I’ve already said, Ramsey hanging by his bare hand for far longer than plausible is a trope that’s so stupid it kills the suspense.
He pulls himself back into the cab and lies there exhausted. The robot stops right in front of a ever-sneering Luther. He steps directly over Ramsey and has a mild James Bond Villian moment, until Ramsey slams the Robot Speed Down button. The cab plummets, throwing Luther totally off-balance (actually, only partially off-balance. Simmons doesn’t act this bit too well), until Ramsey slams the Stop button, which catapults Luther out of the cab and flat on his back on the ground floor, where the waiting robospiders gang up on him and do him in. Killed by his own creation, how poignant, etc.
Re-united with Bobby and Thompson,* he tells Bobby to go to the car and “Tell Lois you’re all right.” Waitaminit, Lois herself isn’t all right, she’s smashed to bits. Ramsey then approaches the corpse of Luther. Ignoring Luther’s dead open-eyed gaze and the half-dozen spiders with their acid-tipped needles plunged into Luther, Ramsey feels for a pulse. That’s the third time he’s done that. If this is supposed to mean something, I have no idea what. Luther does a variation of the Spring-Loaded Cat by resurrecting himself long enough to suddenly grab Ramsey arm and scream. Ramsey’s expression indicates that this happens to him all the time.
[ * - Props to the movie for remembering that Thompson and Bobby had climbed up to the second floor. Most movies would’ve blown that.]
The spiders have a sense of artistry. Rather than exploding as soon as they empty their needles into their victims like they’ve done each time so far, these spiders all held off until this moment, when they all explode in rapid succession. Fireworks!
Thompson and Ramsey have cute talk, then, at 1:36:30, they engage in, I’m not kidding, a two-minute-long kiss as the credits roll. Okay, they break from 1:37:05 to 1:37:09, from 1:37:30 to 1:37:36, and from 1:37:44 to 1:37:48, but still! It’s worse than any Big Red ad you’ve ever seen! Especially because throughout the whole kiss, sparks from the machinery are flying all over Creation. Get it? Sparks flying? There are sparks flying between them! C’mon, it’s cute, be impressed!
At 1:38:39, they finally fade to black. For all I know, they’re still there kissing. The only distraction during the kiss was the credit “Synthesizer programming: Joel Goldsmith.” I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when father was asking son how to use this newfangled technology.
AFTERTHOUGHTS
Runaway was meant to be the sci-fi hit of 1984, but got cremated by The Terminator. Even without The Terminator , it probably still would’ve tanked. A less-than-coherent plot, scenes that have nothing to do with anything, a near-total lack of suspense, and one-dimensional characters sent this movie straight into obscurity. So it’s just another demonstration that big budget and big names are no substitute for a good coherent story.
Still, it’s not all bad. Michael Crichton may have blown it on the narrative front, but he shows that he knows how to do cool action scenes, with only the climactic action scene faltering (Of course, that’s the one scene that should be the best, so there’s room for improvement), he offers some neato technological possibilities, and best of all, he keeps the potentially preachy commentary to the incidental dialogue, enabling the viewer to take it or leave it instead of cramming it down our throats. Characters throw out “socially relevant” comments here and there, but once the action starts, that get deservedly pushed aside. Example: Ramsey says early on that machines can be expected to break down because they’re made by imperfect humans. This may be a running theme in the movie, as machines explode upon completing their functions several times. But Ramsey doesn’t shout it at Luther during their confrontations. Once Ramsey is doing something, the moralizing/commentary is dropped. That’s the way I like it.
The acting is solid. I read a review somewhere that said that although every character is one-dimensional, the one dimension of each character is the perfect dimension for the actor playing him/her. That’s pretty accurate. Tom Selleck as a likable everyman, Cynthia Thompson as a nice girl, Gene Simmons mugging his ass off, G.W. Bailey as a police chief. They all do well because their characters are within their respective ranges.
There are three pleasant surprises as far as acting goes:
1. Kirstie Alley as Jackie. She’s the closest thing to multi-dimensional that the movie offers. Jackie is obviously terrified of Luther, but she’s also none-too-pleased to be around Ramsey, either. You get the sense that Jackie got herself caught in a vise, and now that she’s in deep poop, she can’t extricate herself and doesn’t trust anyone who tries to assist. Kinda like a drug addict, I guess. Nice!
2. Bobby. As mentioned earlier, Bobby is played by a 12-year-old but speaks like an 7-year-old. Still, the movie never has him pull a Wesley Crusher. He doesn’t save the day, nor does he assist in his own rescue. In other words, he does what you would expect a real-life kid to do. Refreshing!
3. Gene Simmons as Luther. While he keeps his oily sneer in place throughout, I can’t really say he’s overacting. He seldom raises his voice, and the only times he does is when he needs to shout to be heard. And he never once gestures with his arms. On top of that, there’s a total paucity of self-reference. I’m enough of a Kiss fan that if there were any Kiss in-jokes or subtle allusions to Kiss in here, I would spot them. I didn’t spot any. That’s a pretty ballsy choice, especially for a first starring role for a rock star; because what it means it that while his rock-star status got him in the movie, it wasn’t going to see him through the movie. He’d have to earn his way through it. And for the most part, he does. Granted, he’s not a great actor, and maybe not even a good one; but for a musician indulging his ego by pretending he can act, he comes off like f**kin’ Olivier. I’ll take Simmons in a major role over Mick Jagger, Henry Rollins, or Tom Petty any day.
Tom Selleck’s acting, of course, is no surprise. He knows how to play adult roles, and his likability makes the movie fun to watch more than anything else.
End of dissection. Thank you.
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
Edited by - Food on 11/03/2007 5:10:32 PM |
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BradH812
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
1294 Posts |
Posted - 11/04/2007 : 4:53:17 PM
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Bravo, Food, bravo! I've only seen bits and pieces of Runaway, but what I have seen tells me you hit it spot on. Great, now I'm gonna have to rent the thing and watch it to see if it's exactly as you described it.
By the way, what WAS that pun Tom Selleck made during the car chase? |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 11/04/2007 : 6:14:34 PM
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Thank you kindly, Brad! I had a blast with Runaway.
The pun was when the attack probes appear. Jackie says, "S**T!!!" and Ramsey, with an "Oh poopie" look on his face gives a deadpan "In progress." It's just the way he says it.
[url="http://myspace.com/handsoftime"]The Hands of Time[/url] |
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Gristle McThornbody
Preeminent Apostolic Prelate of the Discipleship of Jabootu
Germany
186 Posts |
Posted - 11/11/2007 : 11:21:36 AM
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Nicely done, Food. I haven't seen Runaway since it first came out on video, but from what I remember you hit the nail on the head.
However, you might want to go into hiding, as Bill Belichick has probably dispatched Mike Vrabel to come after you with an axe for that Foxboro comment. :) In defense of my beloved Patriots, it's the Colts who have been rumored to use devices to hinder the communications of their opponents.
"Hi, I'm Bob Evil!" |
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Food
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
342 Posts |
Posted - 11/11/2007 : 3:56:11 PM
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Thank you kindly, Gristle!
If Vrabel needs an axe to come after me, I take that as a compliment. He don't need no axe! |
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Runaway (1984)
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