Some Guys Have All the Luck

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

A Tom Selleck double feature: spider robots and a baby.

RUNAWAY (1984)

Thinking back to my childhood, I have realized that I saw a lot of Tom Selleck when I was growing up – and not just because he was starring on the original version of the TV show Magnum, P.I. during my earliest years of life. Yes, I saw several episodes of Magnum, P.I., but while his greatest successes have come on television, Selleck has also had a solid film career, and some of his movies I watched repeatedly when I was a kid.

My favorite of the bunch was the 1984 sci-fi action film Runaway, which was a box office disappointment when it was first released and seems to have faded into obscurity in the decades since, despite the fact that it was written and directed by best-selling author Michael Crichton, the creator of both Westworld and Jurassic Park. It’s a shame the movie has never been popular – but it was an ‘80s hit as far as I was concerned.

Set in the not-too-distant future, where robots work as housemaids, construction workers, and farm equipment, among other things, the story sees Selleck taking on the role of Sergeant Jack R. Ramsay, a police officer who is joined by new partner Karen Thompson (Cynthia Rhodes) on the runaway squad, which handles issues involving robots that have gone on the fritz. When one household’s robot goes so out of control that it starts attacking people with knives and a gun, Ramsay disables it and then finds some suspicious tech in its guts that can override a robot’s safety features and turn it into a hi-tech killer. 

Ramsay and Karen are soon able to deduce that this tech was created by Dr. Charles Luther (Gene Simmons), who are developed some programs that he intends to sell on the black market, so he’s bumping off his associates. Their investigation leads them to Luther’s ex-girlfriend Jackie Rogers (Kirstie Alley), another person Luther wants dead – and as they try to keep Jackie safe and bring Luther to justice, they have to deal with haywire robots, smart bombs, smart bullets (which can have a person’s identity programmed into them and dodge around obstacles to reach them), and – this is the one that fascinated me the most when I was a kid – mechanical, acid-spitting, explosive spider robots.

Runaway was one of my favorite movies to watch when I was a kid, and revisiting it decades later, I’m a bit surprised that a kid would enjoy it as much as I did. As an adult, I found that my attention would start to wander at some points during its 100 minute running time, despite the fact that it has several fun action sequences. But as a little guy, I was all in for this story of a heroic Tom Selleck, a deeply creepy Gene Simmons, and spider robots.

The movie does hold up rather well overall, and builds to a thrilling climactic sequence where Ramsay has to face his fear of heights to save his young son (with the help of Karen) from Luther at a construction site that’s crawling with spider robots. It’s true that it only took one good scene (sometimes one good moment) for me to really enjoy a movie when I was a youngster, and the climactic stretch of this movie is pretty great. That’s obviously why I loved it and wanted to watch it again and again.

3 MEN AND A BABY (1987)

After years of playing Spock in the Star Trek franchise, Leonard Nimoy stepped behind the camera to direct Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, then stayed at the helm for the most critically and financially successful movie in the series, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. That success opened the door for him to have the chance to direct the 1987 comedy 3 Men and a Baby, which ended up becoming the biggest American box office hit of the year. So it got a good amount of TV play in the late ‘80s, which meant that I had watched it a bunch of times by the end of the decade. I don’t think I had seen it since – so when I went back to it this year, I was surprised to see that I had completely forgotten an entire subplot. I watched the movie with blog contributor Priscilla, and she had also forgotten that subplot.

Tom Selleck, Steven Guttenberg, and Ted Danson star as architect Peter Mitchell, cartoonist Michael Kellam, and actor Jack Holden, three bachelors who share a uniquely designed apartment in New York City. Jack has booked a project that will be filmed in Turkey – and he has just left when a baby is left outside the apartment door with a note from a woman named Sylvia saying the baby is Jack’s and she can’t take care of it right now. With Jack out of the country, the responsibility of taking care of the baby falls on the shoulders of Peter and Michael, who have no experience with babies at all.

That’s all I remembered about 3 Men and a Baby; that it’s a comedy of errors showing Peter and Michael (and eventually Jack, as he returns from Turkey) struggle to figure out how to keep a baby fed, clean, and safe, and soon find themselves caring for the kid very deeply. What neither Priscilla nor I remembered is that another package is left at the apartment door: a box full of heroin that belongs to a friend of Jack’s that has gotten mixed up in drug dealing. So the three men end up having to deal with drugs dealers and suspicious police officers who put them under surveillance.

The apparently quite forgettable drug subplot does lead to some thrilling moments that I suspect were dropped in there to appeal to male audience members who may not be drawn in by all the baby comedy stuff... But I can’t blame the producers or even screenwriters Jim Cruickshank and James Orr for adding this unnecessary element, because the movie is based on a French film that was written and directed by Coline Serreau, and the drug subplot was in there, too.

Even with that drug stuff going on, 3 Men and a Baby is a funny, heartwarming comedy that’s just as entertaining to watch now as it was in 1987. If you haven’t seen it in a while, check it out – and you might discover there’s more to it than you remembered.