Death Train (1993), aka The Detonator, was a perennial staple at video stores and retail outlets all through the nineties and into the next decade. The image on the cover of the VHS featuring Pierce Brosnan clutching a machine gun with Patrick Stewart’s face in the sky behind him is etched forever into my memory. Death Train wasn’t a favorite of mine by any means, it just simply hung around on shelves and in bargain bins waiting for me to watch it again.
Death Train really just became a means for me to get a Pierce Brosnan/Bond fix without rewatching Goldeneye (1995) another time. Death Train delivered action aplenty but was always low on quick quips so it never really scratched that itch. But as a devotee of Remington Steele (1982-87) it did do something for me.
Special operatives Pierce Brosnan and Alexandra Paul have been dispatched by Patrick Stewart to stop a train hijacked by Ted Levine under the orders of a renegade Soviet general played by Christopher Lee. Death Train is everything its plot summary suggests. Brosnan is doing his proto-Bond thing in a film that barrows freely from Die Hard, Runaway Train, and a dozen other sources to create a thrilling spectacle.
Death Train isn’t exactly unpredictable in its narrative construction but it is tightly directed by writer and director David Jackson. Jackson proved so adept at making a train movie that he would do it again with the Rob Lowe vehicle Atomic Train (1999) just six years later. Jackson’s work on Death Train was so well received in Britain that Jackson directed a sequel (also starring Brosnan and Paul) called Night Watch (1995). Jackson’s success with Death Train is a testament to his workmanlike direction that cuts through the meat of the drama to the bones of the action.
Death Train‘s short comings are in the script that leaves its leads (Brosnan and Paul) under developed. Luckily for Jackson and company the two leads have a natural chemistry that suggests a depth of character that is never successfully realized. The script also feels like a greatest hits of blockbuster thrillers from the mid-eighties through the early nineties. Death Train is fun but its story is nothing all that special.
