There an overweight, slovenly sort named Dewey (a dead-on Ethan Suplee), a guy who screams ineptitude the moment he walks on the scene, screws up in a major way. These men try to establish a working relationship in their cab while dealing with personal issues (Colson is concerned with his estranged wife, Barnes with a pair of feisty grown daughters) the scene shifts to another train yard elsewhere in Pennsylvania. “Do it right, and if you don’t know, ask.” (OK, that’s two rules, but who’s quibbling?) Barnes also believes “if you make a mistake in training they give you an F, out here you get killed,” which is a difficult argument to refute. However Colson’s partner for the day, veteran “28 years on the line” engineer Frank Barnes (Washington) may be hard but he’s fair. Written by Mark Bomback with a fine sense of potential mayhem around the next curve, “Unstoppable” is obviously not the place to go for Oscar-winning drama, but by casting top-flight performers across the board the film gets the most out of the “inspired by true events” pandemonium it creates.īefore we so much as see a train we meet Will Colson (Pine), a young man in a Pennsylvania town unhappily sleeping on his brother’s sofa because of some unspecified marital difficulties we will learn all about before the final credits roll.Ĭolson is a newly minted conductor with four months’ experience on the AWVR railway and his arrival on the job is viewed with suspicion by older heads. Scott and company have also made that runaway train, AWVR locomotive 777, look and sound as fearsome as one of those dinosaurs from " Jurassic Park.” Painted bright red with an electric yellow stripe and a yellow and black cowcatcher in front, this is one formidable locomotive. He clearly enjoys having real people involved in real stunts and crashes, even getting Washington and Pine to put in some time on the top of that moving locomotive (though the heaviest lifting was done by expert stuntmen Clay Donahue Fontenot and Daniel Stevens). More than that, in an age when CGI images are second nature, Scott prefers practical effects. Working with veteran colleagues like production designer Chris Seagers and editor Chris Lebenzon (who shares credit with Robert Duffy) and new teammates like cinematographer Ben Seresin, Scott likes nothing better than filling the screen with movement, whether it be darting helicopters, police cruisers with sirens flashing or trains with minds of their own. But while continually doing the same kind of movie might anesthetize some directors, it energizes Scott, who has gotten better and better at building and sustaining traditional kinds of tension. This is also the second straight Scott film (after the underappreciated “The Taking of Pelham 123") involving a train and the sixth of his career to star Denzel Washington, here sharing the screen with “Star Trek’s” Chris Pine and one very out of control locomotive. With action auteur Tony Scott directing, “Unstoppable” certainly features a lot that we’ve seen before, from its vehicle-from-hell format to its venerable advertising line: “1,000,000 Tons, 100,000 Lives, 100 Minutes.” Yes, they still do make them that way.
A runaway train drama that never slows down, it fashions familiarity into a virtue and shows why old-school professionalism never goes out of style.
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