3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.12.10
There’s something about trains.
In the same way that baseball movies are far more interesting than football movies, thrillers set on trains are much more involving than similar stories set on planes, ships, cars or buses. Call it the romance of the rails; call it whatever you like. The simple truth is that train movies touch us profoundly.
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| Hey, it's a movie about a runaway train ... which means that veteran brakeman Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington) eventually will wind up climbing on top of the beast and trying to make his way to the engine. Think he'll make it? |
Some actors shy away from sharing the screen with children or small animals, lest they be upstaged. Trains can be added to that list; it’s almost as if they’re living, breathing entities with souls of their own.
Buster Keaton dazzled viewers all the way back in 1926, with the train-oriented comedy of The General
. Cinema’s avowed master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, understood the power of trains; one of his very first talkies, 1932’s Number 17
, climaxed with a furious train and car chase (using a tabletop model train set for much of the “action,” but hey; he did his best). Hitch perfected the template a few years later, with 1938’s The Lady Vanishes
, and we’ve thrilled to slick, well-designed train epics ever since.All of which explains why Unstoppable is such an engaging, hell-for-leather experience … even though director Tony Scott and writer Mark Bomback have crafted a manipulative, overwrought, at times laughably melodramatic Hollywood experience in every sense of the phrase.
Doesn’t matter. It’s a train movie, and an impressively mounted one. Surrender your cynical skepticism, sit back and prepare to enjoy the ride, ’cause Scott orchestrates this thriller with the seasoned hand of a master conductor.
Although an opening crawl suggests that the story to follow is “inspired” by actual events, that should be taken with a grain of salt. Bomback’s screenplay is Tinseltown artifice through and through, although it does unfold due to the sort of numb-nuts carelessness that resulted in the October 2008 Metrolink commuter train crash in California, when its engineer distracted himself by texting … and plowed into a freight train, killing himself and 24 other people.
