Movie Review: Unstoppable

Tony Scott’s frenetic Unstoppable never puts on the brakes

— Unstoppable is a simple story about a runaway train and the two ordinary guys who try to stop it. It’s directed by Tony Scott, and it stars Denzel Washington and Chris Pine, and maybe that’s all you really need to know - it’s not hard to deduce that it’s a state-of-the-art, expensive thriller.

It’s also based on a true story. In 2001 a 47-car freight train got away from its engineer (who was in the yard but not on the train at the time) and left its yard unmanned. It ran, at speeds up to 47 miles an hour, through 66 miles of northwest Ohio before it was halted- in a manner similar to, but not quite as, dramatic as the one used in the movie. No one was injured in the incident, but two of the cars contained a hazardous product called molten phenol acid, a toxic ingredient of paint that’s harmful when inhaled, ingested or comes into contact with the skin.

Had they not stopped that train, bad things would have happened.

In the Hollywood version, the train moves a lot faster. It’s not just a train chugging through the countryside, it’s a “missile the size of the Chrysler Building.” And the ordinary heroes are a lot more heroic - they have to leap from car to car, push themselves physically and endure lots of last-second tension. And it’s in Pennsylvania, not Ohio.

But, if you’re not overly interested in the historical accuracy of your runaway train action movies, there’s very little to nitpick in this incredibly quick-paced thrill ride. All the familiar rolling disaster notes get played - imperiled schoolchildren, imperiled animals, imperiled populations, idiot bureaucrats, ill-advised gambits on the part of the authorities and selfless acts of bravery. The film doesn’t take itself too seriously, and Scott wraps the whole thing up in a tidy 95 minutes.

Well, it is sort of hard to believe that the wizened old timer Frank (Washington, veering enjoyably close toself-parody) would actually forget his daughter’s birthday, given that his two daughters (who are working their way through school waitressing at Hooters) seem to be his whole life.

(And it’s sort of annoying that the Fox 43 newscasters who provide the play-by-play of the ongoing drama seem to have not only an encyclopedic knowledge of locomotives and the physics of railroading, but insist on calling our heroes by their first names. These guys are not only omniscient, they’re a little overly familiar. It all seems strange until you remember the movie was made by 20th Century Fox.)

On the positive side, the movie makes an unsubtle argument that honest competence is to be favored over cheap labor - and Ethan Suplee earns our empathy as an earnest screw-up whose momentary lapse has lethal consequences. We get Rosario Dawson as the yard boss who sides with the working stiffs over the bean counters (exemplified by Kevin Dunn), and Chris Pine as the trainee who’s not quite sure he wants to join the family business. Best of all, we get Kevin Corrigan in the usually thankless role of exposition provider - he plays a federal inspector who happens to be in the railroad yard on the fateful day because he’s supposed to give a lecture on train safety to a group of schoolchildren (imperiled).

The movie’s hardest work is done by the special effects people, and the mind reels at how much it must have cost to play with these really expensive toys. (There was an unplanned train derailment during the production of the movie - no one was hurt but it shut down shooting for the day.)

MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 11/12/2010

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