Film Review: Unstoppable (3 stars)
Tony Scott’s latest hyperkinetic romp plays out like a math problem posed by an evil genius. A train leaves Stanton, Penn., at noon, accelerating at 1 m/s. Twenty kilometres away, a train full of schoolchildren is approaching at 10 m/s. How many seconds before Denzel Washington says something caustic to co-star Chris Pine?
(Bonus problem: Calculate the probability that Washington, who plays an engineer for a giant railroad company, is one trip away from retirement?)
Unstoppable is based on actual events that you may not remember because, frankly, they were small potatoes compared to the fictional version. In 2001, a driverless train left a rail yard in Toledo, Ohio, trundled through three counties and was eventually stopped without incident, 106 kilometres away. In Unstoppable, the runaway train, loaded with dangerous chemicals, is breathlessly described as “a missile the size of the Chrysler building!”
There’s a lot of breathless exposition in the movie, so much in fact that "Unbreathable" might have been a better title. When someone suggests sneaking up behind the train with another locomotive, hooking on and applying the brakes, it’s expressed (breathlessly) as: “We’re talking about coupling at 10 times the normal speed -- in reverse!” I think the Kama Sutra has a chapter on that.
Scott’s last film was a remake of the subway-jacking movie The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, and he seems to have caught the train bug. Unstoppable is a simple enough assignment for the bombastic director who got his big break with 1986’s Top Gun and has neither looked back nor turned down the volume since. All screenwriter Mark Bomback has to do is find a way to get the train rolling, because then by definition it’s ...
Ethan Suplee (TV’s My Name Is Earl) provides the initial push as a dopey engineer who fails to connect the train’s air brakes, pushes the throttle forward, hops off to move a track switch and then can’t run fast enough to get back on. Rosario Dawson is the ground-traffic controller who can’t believe what’s just happened but can’t do much to stop it. Kevin Dunn is the executive whose top concern is what this will do to the railroad’s stock. And Kevin Corrigan is the inspector who helpfully knows things like: What is molten phenol? And why would it be bad if a train carrying it was derailed?
This leaves all the heavy lifting in the hands of Washington and Pine. Washington helped save the day in 2009’s Pelham, then went on to save the Bible in The Book of Eli. Pine is Captain Kirk. It’s the old unstoppable-object-meets-irresistible-force scenario.
Of course, Washington’s character has been a railroad man for more than 28 years, while Pine plays the four-months-on-the-job rookie, still wearing the engineer’s equivalent of a lobster bib. You know they’ll find time to bicker, even as they’re hurtling along at speeds that would make a bullet train blush.
The results aren’t going to win any awards, but Scott certainly knows how to create tension on the tracks. By keeping both the camera and the train in constant motion, he makes it nearly impossible to judge an object’s true speed, except that it’s clearly faster than anything operated by VIA.
The sense of terminal velocity is compounded by a soundtrack that eschews music in favour of a wall of sound effects -- every clank, clatter, rattle and squeal is amplified and bounced off the cinema’s walls. Various solutions are attempted, such as a lowering a Marine from a helicopter into the engine or derailing the train before it can reach a populated area. “Son of a bitch won’t even know what hit it,” someone says, clearly taking the whole thing personally.
But that’s the way it is with runaway trains. I don’t think Scott has done any computer-generated work to the front of this one, but by the movie’s midway mark, not long after it tries to run over some innocent ponies, it actually starts to look evil. If you’re looking for a movie with a clear villain, you can’t do much better than one that begs us to cry: “Stop that train!”
cknight@nationalpost.com
Read more Entertainment
No comments:
Post a Comment