YMMV / Runaway

• Awesome Music: The film does benefit considerably from having the late, great Jerry Goldsmith as its soundtrack composer. Notably, it was his first attempt to create an all-electronic score, and in that regard it certainly doesn't disappoint.
• Complete Monster: Dr. Charles Luther is a genius roboticist and hacker who creates spiderbot assassins, a gun with heat-seeking bullets, and a chip that can turn any regular robot into a weapon; all for sale on the black market to the highest bidder. Luther kills almost everyone he encounters over the course of the movie in increasingly brutal fashion. Additionally, he regularly beats his girlfriend, tries to kill her when she's taken by the police to keep her from talking, and ultimately puts a knife through her skull the second she is returned to him as part of a hostage exchange. His final encounter with Sgt. Jack Ramsay is designed to psychologically torture the cop as much as possible—he kidnaps his son Bobbie, sets up the exchange on top of a high rise to play to Ramsay's acrophobia and vertigo, then releases Bobbie—only to inform Ramsay that his robots are waiting to kill the first person who exits the building.
• Evil Is Cool: Weirdly enough Dr Luther, although he's a slimeball who on paper doesn't seem like he'd be a cool villain, does have a variety of weapons at his disposal (such as a heat tracking gun, spider bots and moving car bombs) and is a highly effective assassin who kills multiple targets and often gets the better of Ramsay throughout the film.
• Love to Hate: Dr Luther has zero redeeming features and is utterly cruel; however, Gene Simmons' over-the-top performance makes him a thorough entertaining bastard — easy to root against and undeniably fun.
• Narm: The idea of a malfunctioning robot menace could be more effective if they all weren't just in essence boxes with wheels (the cost of going for a more realistic approach to the concept of service bots, alas).
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Although the killer bots are basically walking boxes, the spider bots are highly disturbing as they spit acid and inject their target with it, and then blow up. A particularly disturbing scene has Sally, a kind-hearted policewoman who the audience has grown to like, get injected by one; her colleague tries to help her as he hears her screams of pain only for the bot to blow up, killing both.
  • The plot-triggering crisis with the gun-wielding robot sounds ridiculous on paper, but actually makes for a chilling sequence as Ramsay tries (and thankfully succeeds) to save a baby while being shot at in the dark by an unseen assailant.
  • Dr Luther, dear lord Dr Luther. An utterly cold-hearted sociopath who shows no traces of empathy and kills various people including plenty of innocent police officers both out of his greed and his sadism, Luther is both an evil genius and an unstoppable force of nature, who comes across as almost robotic in how he hunts down his targets and disposes of them. The most terrifying example of this is his murder of his ex-girlfriend Jackie who kills by sticking a blade in her neck in a public restaurant without anyone except Ramsay noticing. In a film full of killer robots, a human being manages to be the most horrifying thing here, to the point where he would fit right at home as a slasher movie villain with the high body count he racks up and the fact that he seems unstoppable right up until the very end.
  • Dr Luther's death scene is both cathartic and horrifying as he gets injected with the same bots he used to kill various people. Worse still is the fact that he comes back for one last jump scare trying to kill Ramsay — yes, even after being pumped full of acid — before dying with his eyes wide open. Even in death, the man's the definition of terrifying.
  • For those that hate heights (and thus are in the same boat as Ramsay), the finale on top of a construction site with Ramsay hanging off the side of a lift as he tries to escape both the spider bots and the sociopathic evil genius, who set this up specifically because he knows Ramsay's weakness and takes pleasure in exploiting it, is nerve-wracking to watch.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Kirstie Alley plays the Damsel in Distress.
  • Seems like Captain Harris got tired of training police cadets and took a job leading a police squad hunting down homicidal robots.

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