It’s kinda rare i’ll write about a movie a week after watching it, but I kept thinking about this one so I thought I’d get something down on screen. Unstoppable, Tony Scott, Denzil Washington, and Chris Pine. I don’t know much about Chris Pine, I liked most of Star Trek and thought he was pretty good in it, but another Scott/Washington partnership is nothing to turn your nose up at. I enjoyed the film, but I didn’t necessarily think it was that great, but, I don’t think it was really........trying to be. Tony Scott sure wanted to make the best out of what he had to work with, but a film of this kind of subject matter, could it really be any better than this? Unless it goes all dusk til dawn on your ass and turns into a vampire massacre, but it doesn’t. The movie is about a train carrying some kind of toxic chemicals belting towards a small town in a grim looking Pennsylvania, it’s going at full speed and there’s nobody driving it. Pretty tense huh?I haven’t ever been to Pennsylvania. I may do one day, but dam that place looks like England. Grim and overcast, I know somebody currently in Pensylvania, so I plan on asking them to watch Unstoppable just so I can ask them, does that place really look that grim? Or is it just Tony Scott and his DOP trying to make it look as much like a British movie as possible. Another thing I would love to know, is how many fucking helicopters they used to shoot this thing! I wouldn’t be surprised if it cost half the budget. Scotts wages, Denzels Wages, the cost of one (yes, ONE) huge explosion, and the rest was on helicopter rental. Locations were pretty limited, the control room, Denzil & Pines train cockpit, the odd junction or town, and the train, from the air shot from a helicopter.
It gets pretty tense at times, they try a bunch of things to stop this train and nobody has any luck, so it’s left for Denzel & Pine to risk their lives, which of course they were going to do, and come up with something. I genuinely think all the bad stuff I have to say about this flick is a complete waste of time, because as i’ve already said, this movie wasn’t ever meant to be a cinematic master piece, it does all the right things, keeps you entertained, you near as dam it ride along with that train for as long as the movie lasts, but you know......there are a couple of things here I thought could have been improved, or worked on, and I’m gonna say what they are else I’m going to run out of things to write about pretty soon!
We are constantly reminded about the danger ahead, the reason why the race against time is on to stop this train because if they don’t it’s going to make its way into a town where the tracks run through and if the train makes it there, it could be catastrophic. So........they show you this on a map, and they show you a bend in the rail line, I thought to myself, exactly why are they worried about it reaching this place? It’s not the end of the track, it could run through no problems, but there was that bend in the track on the map they kept showing. But I knew sod all about this bend, was it a dangerous bend? How big was it? Where exactly is it? near to where most people hang out? I had no idea. The movie eventually decides to tell us this about 1 hour and 15 minutes in, they tell you the speed the train needs to be going at to navigate this bend (obviously it’s going faster) they show you the bend, but why didn’t they do that earlier then I’d know what we were up against. For me it would’ve made the situation a lot tenser for more of the movie.
And my next complaint is the tacked on back stories for the two main characters. Denzel’s lost the trust of his daughters, and Pine has fallen out with his wife. They have conversations about their lives and what not but it just felt a bit false, the typical disgruntled family member that’s obviously going to stand up and cheer for their heroic husband/father when it comes time that they finally save the train.....assuming they save the train! SPOILER: almost nothing bad happens in this movie. One guy dies when trying some stupid manoeuvre to stop the train about half an hour into the film, but we don’t know shit about this dude, he dies, Denzel’s his friend, he’s upset for about 5 seconds then Pine does something else to piss him off and he forgets all about it. Another lead on.....Pine and Denzel start off with a really generic “i’m the vet, you’re the rookie” relationship, they don’t really see eye to eye, but their relationship starts to build as soon as they start talking about their crappy lives.
The reason for the unstoppable train becoming unstoppable is simply some idiot over weight driver (Ethan Suplee) jumping out whilst it is moving to switch track lines manually, and the train runs off without him, pretty stupid really, but Ethan plays a stupid enough dude to make this look like a genuine act of buffoonery.
For a Tony Scott flick (and I’m a huge fan of Tony Scott) the editing is nice and moderately paced, the action (although minimal) is shot coherently (usually by helicopter) but there are no bad guys in Unstoppable, apart from maybe the directors of the rail company intent on derailing the train, but I wouldn't call them baddies, they're just corporate assholes who think they no best, so yes, no bad guys just a bad train.
Unstoppable is a very enjoyable film, it isn’t exactly original, it isn’t groundbreaking and it will probably never be considered a classic. But what it is is the work of a master film maker essentially making a gritty action film about a train and 2 guys trying to stop it. It didn’t for one second get boring, it was fun and straight forward, I think anybody that watches unstoppable will probably say the same, depending on how snobbish they are, it does what it’s meant to do, entertain, and it does it well.
