The setting is a world in which robots are everywhere. They do everything for us. They have not only taken over many jobs they also run our homes, cook dinner for us, look after our kids. What’s interesting is that there’s no attempt to give the movie a futuristic look. This is just the world of the 80s, but with lots of robots.
It’s quite possible that this movie would have had a bigger commercial impact if Crichton had had the kind of budget Ridley Scott had on Blade Runner and could have given us an uber-cool cyberpunk world. But perhaps that’s not what Crichton would have wanted. He’s more interested in the ideas than the visuals. He thought of himself as a writer of techno-thrillers rather than science fiction.
And this really is essentially a techno-thriller. The robots are not hyper-futuristic. They’re the sorts of industrial and domestic robots that seemed likely to be available in the very near future. They’re not humanoid. They look like mobile fax machines or advanced vacuum cleaners. They either look boring and innocuous or they look cute. That’s what makes them creepy and scary. They look harmless until they start trying to kill you.
But moviegoers want science fiction movies that look like science fiction movies. They want either spaceships or futuristic cityscapes (as in Logan’s Run and Blade Runner). They want uber-cool robots, like the Terminator ones. They want sci-fi coolness. Runaway doesn’t offer that. It’s a cop thriller with robots.
I like the lack of the obvious sci-fi trappings but audiences didn’t. Runaway flopped at the box office.
Sergeant Ramsey (Tom Selleck) is a cop and he’s on the squad that deals with malfunctioning robots. The Runaway Squad. This is a world in which robots are ubiquitous and everybody relies on them but the damned things just don’t work properly. Sometimes when they malfunction it’s inconvenient. Sometimes when they malfunction they kill people. And it’s a world in which people just seem to take all this for granted.
In other words it’s like today’s world. Total reliance on very cool technology that works some of the time. And can at any time decide to kill you.
Ramsey has one small problem - he suffers badly from vertigo. As you might expect the plot keeps requiring him to be in scary high places.
Ramsey has a new partner, Officer Karen Thompson (Cynthia Rhodes). She has a crush on him almost from the start.
A very ordinary domestic robot has just started chopping people up. The owner assures Ramsey that the robot has not been modified in any way (robots tend to turn dangerous when people try to modify them). But someone had definitely modified this robot. There’s a chip there that shouldn’t be there and the police experts don’t know what it does. But whatever it does is probably bad.
It becomes obvious that there’s a super-villain involved. His name is Luther and he’s played by Gene Simmons. Yes, that Gene Simmons. Frontman for the band KISS. He may not be the world’s greatest actor but he knows how to ooze crazed evilness.
Ramsey gets a break. He has Luther’s girl in custody. Her name is Jackie (Kirstie Alley). She knows something. She’s definitely a femme fatale type, she knows something important and Luther wants her back and not just because she’s a doll. She has something he needs. If Ramsey can find out what it is he’ll be ahead of the game but his problem is that Luther is a tech genius, he can hack into any system and he knows everything that Ramsey is doing.
Selleck is very good. It’s a much more low-key than in Magnum, P.I. - he’s a nice guy but a bit on the serious side. Kirstie Alley is fun as the sexy bad girl. Cynthia Rhodes is likeable. Gene Simmons is good but Luther’s limitation as a super-villain is that his plans are not particularly grandiose.
This was 1984 so the special effects are old school. Despite the robots this is not a movie that relies heavily on effects.
I like Runaway quite a bit for what it is - a low-key techno-thriller. Recommended.
The 101 Films Blu-Ray looks very good. There’s an audio commentary but it’s probably best to skip it.
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