Narrow Margin

What this sometimes witty time-filler never quite manages is a genuine sense of confined menace. For that, you'll have to get aboard the original when it next plays on TV. Read full review

Narrow Margin is nothing if not a hard-edge train thriller and to swathe it in so much atmospheric murk that audiences are going to suspect the premature arrival of cataracts seems counterproductive, at the very least. Read full review

To his credit, writer-cinematographer-director Peter Hyams (RUNNING SCARED) doesn't pretend he's reinventing the wheel here--he just sees to it that all the pieces are in place and that there aren't too many opportunities for the premise to trip over its own implausibilities. Read full review

Though the story evokes old movie formulas - from Strangers on a Train to the 1952 film The Narrow Margin, which inspired it - this film does not reinvent them. It dully echos their conventions. Read full review

Narrow Margin, despite a sturdy turn by Gene Hackman as a cynical assistant DA, is a thinly scripted procession of train-movie clichés. Read full review

Spectacular stunt work and Canadian locations punch up the train thriller Narrow Margin, but feature remake is too cool and remote to grab the viewer. Read full review

Narrow Margin isn't awful. It's solid and adult, but plodding and dull, rather like a living room filled with the last generation's furniture - not old enough to be considered an interesting antique, yet fundamentally out of touch with the present. It's too reasonable for its own good. [21 Sep 1990, p.44p]

Like D.O.A., Against All Odds, No Way Out and other recent remakes of film noir classics, this overblown and heavy-handed film is just one more reminder of how much more thoughtful and entertaining movies used to be. [21 Sep 1990]

Narrow Margin feels more tired than classic, even if it manages to provide some thrills. There's just not enough there to grab us. Read full review

This is vintage B-movie material, and if you really want to catch a vintage B movie that uses the material effectively, try the original 1952 version of the same name. Read full review

Watching a merely adequate thriller is like eating an ungarnished hot dog - it goes down all right, but where's the spice and what's the point? Narrow Margin combines a solid cast with workmanlike direction and a decent if undistinguished script. Add it up and...you guessed it...all dog and no garnish. [24 Sep 1990]