This is a film based on an unmade Kurosawa screenplay, which both makes sense and doesn't. It doesn't because the dialogue is just god-awful, but it does seem as if it's been badly translated from another language altogether (and another sensibility). However, on the other hand, the film is (in its exterior shots, at least) gorgeous to look at, and clearly filmed on location (it's set in Alaska) with real trains, no models or suspect special effects.
And the beginning sequences in a prison really look more like one would imagine a prison in the USSR would look like (apparently they were shot in Old Montana State Prison), which is perhaps because its director, Andrei Konchalovsky, is Russian (he started out working with Tarkovsky on Ivan's Childhood and Andrei Rublev. I remarked while watching the film that it would work better if it was entirely in a foreign language, because one is more likely to forgive stilted dialogue when it's in subtitle form. And overall one gets the impression that nobody making this film other than the actors spoke much English, so they couldn't really tell if the actors were delivering their lines naturalistically. And, with a couple of exceptions (Jon Voight is very good, even when he has to deliver decidedly odd dialogue) the acting is bad, even from people who are good in other things.
Here's the plot: it begins inside a prison where the TV is showing the warden (Ranken- played as a sort of knock-off Dennis Hopper by an actor called John P. Ryan) being interviewed elsewhere because he's been required by a court to let a certain prisoner (Voight's Manny) out after having been literally welded into his cell for three years, for repeatedly escaping. Hearing this over the TV (because Eric Roberts's Buck (a young doofus amateur boxer with some kind of Southern Accent, who is incredibly annoying - like a moronic version of Voight's Joe Buck from Midnight Cowboy) has persuaded an old prison guard to turn up the volume - something he quickly regrets) everyone in the prison goes wild, throwing lit pieces of cloth or paper out of their cells, or milling about smashing things. However, Ranken is completely unfazed when he returns and just strolls through the flames without looking left or right. He has come to free Manny, but also to berate and scorn him. Anyway, after some scenes in the prison (Buck fights another boxer, played, in his first role, by Danny (credited as "Daniel") Trejo, somebody (clearly put up to it by Ranken) stabs Manny through the hand, and a prison guard takes pot shots from on high at the resulting melee) Manny is ready to escape. (Unfortunately, because of the stabbing, it is now Winter in Alaska.) Buck has a job pushing the laundry cart and manages to smuggle Manny to a room that has a manhole leading to the sewers. Buck demands to be taken along, and has to grease himself up and wade through shit (while complaining loudly the whole time) before being projected over a waterfall and into a freezing river. Then they have to trudge through the snow until they get to a station, where Buck finds some shoes to put on his frozen feet in a locker, and Manny decides a train that consists of four engines coupled together with no train cars is the one for them.
What they don't realize is that the driver, realizing he's having a heart attack, slams on the breaks, but without disengaging the throttle. He then falls off the train a dies. The train quickly burns through the brakes and speeds off. All this (except the stowaways) is quickly discovered at train HQ, where a young hotshot who designed the multi-million dollar computer system that the trains run on (in Alaska? in the 80s? Okay...) is not too bothered, because he figures he can make sure the train gets shunted off somewhere. In fact, he asks an old guy to switch the points and ensure the train wrecks, when the geezer hears the train horn and tells them that there must be people on the train. This is also news to our convicts, who have come to believe there's nobody up front, mainly because the train clipped the rear end of another train that was too slow getting on to a branch line without blowing any horn earlier. Turns out the horn was blown by Sara, whom Wikipedia informs me is a "locomotive hostler" who was napping when the driver keeled over, and who is played by Rebecca de Mornay,
looking nothing like the sexpot she'd played in Risky Business a couple of years earlier. She makes her way back to where the convicts are (in the rear engine) because she's realized that the only way to stop the train is in the front engine, and the afore-mentioned collision has jammed the door in engine #2 that you need to go through to get there, so she was going to the rear to get as far away from the front as possible. From there on it's bickering for our two men and one woman, worries about chemical plants and bridges back at HQ, and then Ranken figures out his men are on the train and tracks it down with a helicopter,
after it's been sent down a dead end track to certain doom. Our guys manage to slow it down a little (enough so they get across the bridge at about 70 instead of 90 and thus make it across) by cutting the cables between all but first and second engine, but they can't get through the stuck door, and, because of the second engine's plane-like nose, cannot clamber along the outside as they have for the others. Until that is, a man hanging out of Ranken's helicopter, supposedly coming to get them,
slips and crashes through the window of their engine. Then Manny (who has previously tried to drive Buck to a suicidal mission along the outside of the second engine, and then erupted in a stabby fury when Sara let Buck back in) decides he's going to clamber through the broken window and jump. (This despite his stabbed hand bleeding again.)
He falls under the equipment joining the engines and crushes his hand (very convincingly) on the coupling while pulling himself up. Meanwhile Ranken has taken his turn on the rope ladder and is coming, gun in hand. However Manny beats him up with a fire extinguisher and cuffs him in the cabin of the front train. Ranken tells him he has to push the emergency stop button, if not to save them, at least to save Buck and Sara. This reminds Manny (who's going a little crazy - three years in solitary will do that) of their existence, but instead of pressing the button, he goes back and uncouples their train, waves, and clambers on top of the front engine to ride it to a fiery demise. Fade to black, with a Richard III quote: ""No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast."
I skipped over a lot of philosophizing. Manny gives a speech where he says you've got to grind grind grind at the grindstone, to which Buck says he'd rather be in jail, and Manny repeats wistfully that he wishes he could be like those who can live a normal life. All of which would have made a lot of sense in a Japanese or Soviet film, but which is hard to take, especially with Eric Roberts involved.
Kurosawa wrote the original script in the 60s, but the film, despite being made in 1984 has a definite 70s vibe about it. Everything looks shabby, for one thing, out of keeping with the glossy Reagan 80s. (And nobody looks glamorous - they all have very realistically windburned cheeks.) So, all in all, an oddity. A very well-made trashy B-movie, which I guess makes sense given that it was a Cannon Films release, albeit with pretensions to something greater. Watch it for the scenery, at least, or if you're a trainspotter.
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