If unmanned freight train A leaves the station at 8am going 70 miles per hour and locomotive B leaves the station at 10am carrying Denzel Washington and Chris Pine, how mediocre will Unstoppable be when it arrives at a theatre near you? Incredibly.
At the start of the film, newbie conductor Will Colson (Pine) clocks in for his assigned freight delivery with 28-year veteran Frank Barnes (Washington). Little do the guys know that at another train yard, a less than brilliant rail worker (My Name Is Earl’s Ethan Supplee) has unwittingly put his train, which by the way has no auto-lock brakes, into high gear before hopping off to flip a switch. That puts Will and Frank’s train on a collision course with the 39-car, half-mile-long behemoth carrying eight cars of hazardous material. Did I mention it was based on a true story?
Throw in a near miss with a passenger train full of second-graders, a race against the clock before the train has to take a killer curve over a highly populated Pennsylvania city, some corporate greed and stupidity (epitomized by Kevin Dunn as a railroad executive) and Rosario Dawson’s chiseled jaw, and Unstoppable seems on the right track to action movie success. But unlike the titular runaway train, this movie goes off the rails.
As scripted by Mark Bomback (who also wrote 2007’s Live Free or Die Hard, a movie I fell asleep on not once but twice), Unstoppable is just a bundle of mildly amusing one-liners wrapped in a kind of cool premise. There are some indicators of character–Frank is a doting dad with two hot daughters and a dead wife and Will has troubles of his own at home–but this is largely filler. Frank and Will are first and foremost working class hero types: the young smartass who gets an attitude adjustment by fate and the grizzled but affable old black guy who’s getting too old for this stuff. Perhaps it’s best that way since, in the few dramatic scenes where the guys discuss their back-stories, it becomes clear that Bomback is not equipped to handle character development. I’ll admit that some of the more enjoyable movies of this genre, including 1994’s Speed, have been made of similarly flimsy stuff, but this film’s stilted dialogue will leave you begging for a Keanu Reeves “woah” or at least more speeding-train shots.
At those, veteran director Tony Scott (Ridley’s younger brother) handily delivers. As suits his subject matter, Scott employs some of the most frenetic camera work I have ever seen. The out-of-control train is shot from every possible vantage point, including from a series of helicopter-mounted news cameras. These shots are then oversaturated with color (Carhartt jackets are extra orange, Pine’s eyes are extra blue, and everyone’s teeth are extra white) and edited together to form scenes with a breakneck pace. Unfortunately, these all act as a signifier that you should be on the edge of your seat rather than a tool to actually put you there.
Even Denzel is not as charming as he could or should be when working in what is clearly his “stubborn everyman with a million-watt smile” wheelhouse.
It’s not that Scott, who is apparently way into both fast machines and Denzel Washington, doesn’t know how to make a memorable action movie. His better credits include Top Gun, Days of Thunder, Crimson Tide, and last year’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, the latter two of which are among the five films the director has made with Washington. Unstoppable, though, will flit in and out your memory faster than a speeding locomotive.
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