Unstoppable
If the railway thriller Unstoppable looks familiar, it's only because its director, Tony Scott, and star, Denzel Washington, partnered just over a year ago on another railway thriller, The Taking of Pelham 123. In Unstoppable, the train is granted a bigger slice of the narrative pie than it received in Pelham, serving not only as the film's principal setting but also its primary villain. Stocked with a payload of dangerous chemicals, Train 777 (that's one more evil than 666!) hurtles, unmanned, towards a calamitous rendezvous with the helpless residents of Stanton, Pennsylvania. Surely an upgrade over a hammy John Travolta, no?
On whom can we depend to put a stop to this massive killing machine, this "missile the size of size of the Chrysler Building," in the ominous words of Rosario Dawson's station manager? Not the entry-level clods (Ethan Brumlee and T.J. Miller) whose ineptitude originally set the train on its fateful path. (In a chilling testament to the potential dangers posed by the obesity epidemic, a chunky Brumlee runs to catch up with the coasting train in the hopes of triggering its emergency brake before it leaves the station, only to collapse in a wheezing heap, unsuccessful.) Certainly not their supervisor (Kevin Dunn), a middle-management goon more concerned with impressing his corporate superiors than ensuring proper rail safety. And most definitely not the parent company's feckless, golf-playing (the nerve!) CEO, whose disaster-containment strategy is dictated purely by stock price.
No, sooner or later, the burden of heroism must fall on the capable shoulders of our man Denzel. As Frank Barnes, a resolutely competent locomotive engineer on a routine training assignment with a reluctant apprentice (Chris Pine, unshaven), he emerges as the only force capable of preventing the Train of Doom from reaching its grisly destination. Of course, in any train-related emergency such as the one depicted in Unstoppable, a litany of things must go wrong before the task of averting disaster becomes the sole responsibility of the engineer of another train. And screenwriter Mark Bomback (Live Free or Die Hard), trooper that he is, takes care to cycle through every single one of them, lest we question the believability of such a scenario. Because believability is so important in films like this.
Denzel's most formidable foe in Unstoppable, it turns out, is his own director. As an alleged "old-school" filmmaker, Tony Scott largely eschews the usage of CGI, but he embraces almost every other fashionable action-movie gimmick, occasionally to nauseating effect. When the camera isn't jostling about or zooming in and out jarringly, it's wheeling at breakneck speed across a dolly track; countless circling shots of key dialogue exchanges give the impression that we're eavesdropping on these conversations from a helicopter. No static shots are allowed, and cuts are quick and relentless, giving us nary a moment to catch our breath or recover our equilibrium.
These are the tactics of an insecure director, one with startlingly little faith in his material or his performers. As Unstoppable nears it climax, we're invested in the action not because of the incessant play-by-play of the TV reporters who've converged on the scene — a ploy mandated by Scott's frantic style, which by this point has left the story teetering on incoherence — but because of our almost accidental bond with the film's protagonists who, despite the director's best efforts, have managed to make just enough of an imprint on our consciousness that we'd prefer they not perish in a fiery train wreck.
Hollywood.com rated this film 3 stars.