Runaway (1984) ***

     Blade Runner was not a hit during its domestic theatrical run, however much it deserved to be. It found its audience only gradually, in secondary markets— first in overseas release, then on American cable TV, and finally on home video. That explains not only why Blade Runner cash-ins were chiefly a Japanese phenomenon, but also why the handful of such films that did emerge closer to home did so belatedly, after a delay of several years. And then of course the latter group didn’t make much money, either, since the most you can realistically hope for when copying a cult favorite is that one day you’ll have a cult favorite of your own. I’m honestly not sure whether Runaway, easily the best American film to try riding Blade Runner’s nonexistent coattails, has quite achieved cult status in its own right, or whether it’s still better understood to be trapped in the “lone weirdoes howling into the void on its behalf” phase of the process. If it’s the latter, consider this your warning that one of those weirdoes is about to start howling right now. Runaway’s debt to Blade Runner is not nearly as obvious as, say, Mutant Hunt’s, but that’s part of what makes it so noteworthy. Writer/director Michael Crichton had an obvious affinity for the subject matter, too, having built his entire career exploring unethical, irresponsible, and otherwise dysfunctional applications of technological advancement. Somewhat surprisingly, though, Crichton also demonstrated real mastery of the techniques of mid-80’s action cinema. Instead of film noir with a robot-hunting cop, what he gives us in Runaway is a neon-lit, gritty-hip police procedural with a robot-hunting cop. It’s a bit like a sci-fi “Magnum P.I.”— right down to casting Magnum himself, Tom Selleck, in the starring role.

     In the near future (the sharp-eyed and mathematically inclined will find sufficient evidence to fix the year as 1991), robots of the sort that revolutionized manufacturing in the 70’s and 80’s have spread throughout the entire economy. From sweeping floors to answering phones to picking bugs off of crops, if there’s a menial task that requires little manual dexterity and only the bare minimum of independent judgment, chances are somebody makes a robot that can do it. Machines malfunction, though, and that’s as true of the semi-intelligent sort doing the world’s most dismal jobs as it is of any other contraption. Consequently, police departments everywhere have had to implement runaway squads— teams of officers trained to deal with robots gone wild.

     Sergeant Jack Ramsay (Selleck, whom we’ll be seeing again whenever I get around to Daughters of Satan or Terminal Island) is one of those police robot-wranglers. Agricultural pest-control droid starts destroying tomatoes instead of tomato hornworms? Call Jack Ramsay. AI night watchman brandishes its taser at you when you try to leave your office at quitting time? Call Jack Ramsay. Construction robot begins hurling sacks of quick-mix drywall putty off the eighteenth floor of an unfinished highrise? Well, maybe don’t call Jack Ramsay for that, since his acrophobia makes him pretty well useless in high places, but call his new partner, Officer Karen Thompson (Cynthia Rhodes), instead. Usually life on the runaway squad is no more dangerous than a gig with animal control. Your typical commercial robot has only a limited repertoire of behaviors, and no equipment that isn’t strictly necessary to fulfill its designed function. But just as animal control officers must sometimes contend with rattlesnakes and grizzly bears, responding to runaways occasionally carries serious risks indeed.

     One night, for example, Ramsay and Thompson are called out to a house in some tony suburb, belonging to computer engineer David Johnson (Chris Mulkey, of Jack’s Back and Timerider), a high-level employee of the robotics firm, Vectrocon. Johnson’s brand new Model 912 domestic robot— basically a Roomba the size of a crock pot, with an articulated arm enabling it to lift and manipulate common household objects— has gone bull-goose loony, stabbing his wife and eldest child to death with a kitchen knife. Despite his professional skills, Johnson claims to have made no modifications to the 912, so this is truly an out-of-nowhere development. Worse yet, there’s a baby still trapped inside the house, and the homicidal robot has traded up from the knife that it used on its previous victims to the .357 magnum that its owners keep in the nightstand. Ramsay eventually manages to disable the rampaging droid, but not before it kills the foolhardy cameraman from the TV news who followed him into the house in pursuit of unbeatable coverage.

     The whole incident is freakish, obviously, but it’s also fishy. Johnson became strangely agitated when Jack questioned him about the evening’s events, and indeed fled the scene before his infant daughter was rescued. The last thing the engineer said before racing off was curious, too: “My God, he’s crazy! He’s crazy!!!!” Who’s crazy? Then, while Ramsay was gearing up to enter the house, he spotted among the gathering crowd of gawkers the shadiest-looking motherfucker he’d seen in ages (Gene Simmons, from Trick or Treat and KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park). And back at the precinct, Sergeant Marvin James (Sam Shaw, of TNT Jackson and Truck Turner) makes a fascinating discovery while disassembling what’s left of Johnson’s 912: the owner himself might not have made any modifications, but somebody added an after-market chip to its CPU. It’s nothing James has seen before, either— and it comes complete with a self-destruct system! That changes the picture considerably. You don’t rig a computer chip to blow itself up unless you want to make absolutely certain that no one else discovers its function. Under the circumstances, that alone suggests that what this chip does is to turn ordinary household robots into killers. In other words, what happened at the Johnson house wasn’t a runaway. It was murder. It’s an open question why that by itself doesn’t transfer the case out of Ramsay and Thompson’s hands (maybe the runaway squad handles crime committed via robot, too?), but the first thing that leaps out at Jack when he searches the house as a crime scene the following day is a few seconds of video captured by the doorbell camera. It shows the same creepy guy whom Ramsay noticed before, seeking admittance to the house in the guise of a robot repairman. Tellingly, an attempt was made to erase the recording, but didn’t quite catch all of it.

     Meanwhile, in the microchip lab at Vectrocon, Ramsay’s prime suspect— or Charles Luther, to give him his proper name— is meeting with another engineer by the name of Harry (Paul Batten, from Iceman and The Stepfather) to take delivery on a whole batch of chips just like the one that Sergeant James found in David Johnson’s tidying-up droid. Evidently both engineers worked on developing the product, and were well aware that they were supplying some manner of criminal enterprise. Harry was bright enough to hold half the chips, together with the associated circuitry templates, in reserve until after the customer has paid up in full, but he isn’t bright enough to refrain from mentioning where he’s hidden the stuff. Nor is Harry bright enough to make the connection between the prototype chip he and Johnson had already delivered and the “accident” at the latter man’s house last night. The next thing Harry knows, he’s alone in the lab’s clean-suit locker room with an acid-injecting robot bug, and that’s the end of him.

     Johnson, of course, is still at large, and Ramsay and Luther catch up to him almost simultaneously at the flophouse hotel where he’s been hiding out. Jack is right in the middle of arresting the engineer when his mysterious nemesis pulls out a toy arguably even cooler than an acid-envenomed bug-bot. At first glance, the weapon is just an extra-large pistol, but the projectiles it fires are heat-seeking, real-time-adaptive, solid-fueled missiles with explosive tips, capable of homing in on the specific heat signature of the person they’re fired at, and pulling an ungodly number of Gs on whatever path is needed to reach the target. Seriously— who the fuck is this guy?!?!

     Ramsay might never have seen Charles Luther until yesterday, but the unit of his department that deals with organized crime knows him very well indeed. Anything illegal that you can think of, Luther’s probably done professionally at some point in his career. This new robot-master trip of his represents a quantum leap in ambition, however. With the technology he’s suborned from Vectrocon, Luther can position himself as gangland’s deadliest arms dealer, offering cutting-edge firepower to every bad guy from the lowliest street-corner speed-dealer to the most megalomaniacal international terrorist. Ramsay gets lucky, though, when he swings by Vectrocon headquarters in the hope of learning more about the now-deceased David Johnson. One of the executive secretaries— a woman by the name of Jackie Rogers (Kirstie Alley, from Village of the Damned and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)— gets trapped in an office by a malfunctioning robot security guard while he and Thompson are on the premises, and it turns out after the errant machine has been bested that it might have known what it was doing after all. The office belonged to the unfortunate Harry, and Jackie was in the process of raiding the wall safe for the remainder of the murder chips and the circuitry templates for making more. That’s right. Jackie Rogers is Luther’s main squeeze, and if the cops play their cards right, she and the merchandise she was boosting on his behalf have just become the best possible bait with which to trap a criminal mastermind.

     Sci-fi author Cory Doctorow likes to say that artificial intelligence, in its current state of development, isn’t really good enough to do anybody’s job, but is good enough for shrewd marketers to convince our bosses to fire us, and then turn AI loose to fail at our jobs. What makes Runaway the most prescient of all Blade Runner knockoffs is that it envisions a world in which that process is proceeding apace. There are no androids dreaming of electric sheep here— just Roombas, Alexas, and Siris having psychotic breaks and being reprogrammed into assassins by clever bastards whose profit motives are stronger than their atrophied consciences. The robots of Runaway are intriguingly clunky, and most of them are visibly not fit for purpose. Consider, for starters, Ramsay’s mechanical housekeeper, Lois. Although technically she can cook simple meals like spaghetti and canned tomato sauce for Jack’s son, Bobby (Joey Cramer, from Flight of the Navigator and The Clan of the Cave Bear), when Ramsay is out of the house working the evening shift, the results of her culinary labors don’t look terribly appetizing. And although she’s theoretically capable of holding a conversation, she can’t follow one with more than a single human participant, so that she constantly interjects non-sequiturs aimed at the wrong person. For that matter, just imagine trying to live your life with a Model 912 always lumbering about underfoot, even leaving aside the possibility of gangsters reprogramming it to kill you one day. Now notice the number of farmhands standing around to supervise the bug-squishing droids on the first runaway case that we get to see Ramsay and Thompson handle. After all, somebody has to make sure the robots are doing what they’re supposed to, and to take whatever action might be needed when they spontaneously start doing something mindlessly destructive instead. The only intelligent machines here that can do anything half as well as their human masters (let alone better than them) are the ones designed expressly for violence, like the antipersonnel drone missiles and the target-seeking land mines that liven up Runaway’s big car-chase sequence. The rest are merely barely-adequate workarounds for the “problem” of humans demanding appropriate compensation for boring, dangerous, or otherwise shitty jobs.

     But because Michael Crichton is an old, accomplished hand at this sort of thing, he doesn’t belabor any of the points implicit in the world that Runaway depicts. This state of affairs is normal for the film’s characters, so they remark upon it only to address the ways in which Luther is threatening the status quo. Crichton does here what the makers of Soylent Green tried but mostly failed to do a decade before, using a stock plot from outside the domain of science fiction to call attention to the differences between his fictional world and our own. The reason why the trick works in Runaway is because Crichton never contents himself with merely going through the motions of the police procedural. Whether he actually did or not, he acts as if he cares as much about the battle between Ramsay and Luther in and of itself as he does about how it illustrates the potential hazards of living alongside millions of robots made with all the workmanship and quality control of a first-generation Ford Escort.

     Mind you, he’s helped out by some truly superb casting. “Magnum, P.I.” had already established Tom Selleck as the decade’s first iconic action hero, so the star had plenty of relevant experience to draw on for the part of Jack Ramsay. And yet Selleck plays as much against the Magnum type as to it here. As a private investigator, Magnum could always skirt the rules that notionally bind official law enforcement, but Ramsay might be the most conscientious action-movie cop of the whole 1980’s. Magnum was a sex symbol, too, while Ramsay is both harried by the pressures of single fatherhood and densely oblivious to all of Thompson’s tentative romantic advances toward him. Ramsay even has a neurosis that impedes his performance on the job— and no bonus points for guessing that his acrophobia will come into play as a complicating factor to the climax. All in all, Jack is a fully developed and richly layered characterization, on Crichton’s part and Selleck’s alike, both exploiting and subverting the latter’s celebrity persona.

     The same is true in a very different way for Gene Simmons and Charles Luther. Crichton reportedly cast the villain by calling each contender into his office in turn to stare, blank-faced and unblinking, into his eyes for as long as they could stand it; the part went to the actor whose sustained gaze made Crichton the most uncomfortable. In that sense, Luther seems a natural part for a self-conscious avatar of the sinister side of rock and roll (Simmons, after all, was the Demon), but in keeping with Crichton’s unorthodox casting technique, he’s not nearly as flamboyant a figure as you’d expect from “KISS frontman commands an army of killer robots.” Luther’s menace is a matter of dead eyes and flaring nostrils, rather than bellowed threats and maniacal laughter. And Simmons is so good at it that the other characters’ habit of bluntly describing Luther as “evil” quickly becomes annoyingly superfluous. When you’re showing this vividly, there’s no point in telling, too.

Home     Alphabetical Index     Chronological Index     Contact