'Unstoppable' is a thrilling movie experience

There’s only so much you can do when you’re making a film about a runaway train, but with screenwriter Mark Bomback (Deception, Race to Witch Mountain) and director Tony Scott (Top Gun, Enemy of the State) inside the locomotive as engineer and conductor of Unstoppable, the film is anything but a sleeper. Unstoppable is based on a real incident that happened in 2001, when an unmanned train carrying toxic chemicals sped through several towns in Ohio, USA before it was eventually stopped. In the film, Denzel Washington (American Gangster, The Book of Eli) plays veteran railroad engineer Frank Barnes and Chris Pine (Star Trek) is his partner, rookie train conductor Will Colson. When all attempts to stop an unmanned train carrying toxic molten phenol fail—an illustration of Murphy’s Law multiplied by 70 miles per hour—Barnes and Colson hatch a dangerous plan to stop it before it hits a railroad curve at the town of Stanton, Pennsylvania, where experts predict it’s sure to derail and cause a devastating explosion. If that sounds like every other action movie involving high-speed vehicles that need to be stopped, then you might be in for a surprise. Bomback’s script is lean on details—the characters are but silhouettes, and not much is written about the general setting. It is also refreshingly bereft of the usual incidental romance that some writers seem to think an action movie needs to pull in some of the female crowd. This movie doesn’t really need that—if you’ve got the dashing Denzel Washington on a speeding train with the charming Chris Pine riding shotgun, ladies will flock to the theaters with their men. Bomback sketches out the barest of road maps and provides only a rudimentary locomotive for Scott to construct his runaway train of a film on, and therein lies the genius in this partnership. It allows Scott to build on the basic story using a combination of dynamic visuals, Harry Gregson-Williams’ musical score, and the emotion conveyed by his characters as they react to the situation they are in. Scott also capitalizes on how the audience responds to what they are seeing and effectively manages to get them to jump onto the train to take a ride with him. He achieves this, in large part, by conveying a sense of danger that is grounded in reality, opting to shoot real actors on real trains running on real tracks. As a result, everything does look and feel real—the speeding train, the squealing brakes, the clanking of metal. It’s the perfect approach to showcase Train #777—“The Beast"—the film’s deadly half-a-mile long villain with a one-track mind (pun definitely intended). Like any other film, of course, Unstoppable does encounter some speed bumps. The set-up is rather slow and the use of television news reports about the incident to explain certain details and to keep track of the progress of events can suddenly take you out of the action. It is a creative and mostly effective solution to Scott and Bomback’s narrative dilemma, but there are times when it gets in the way of what could have been an exciting sequence that shows more of the characters and more of the action. This train ride won’t be complete if Scott doesn’t have characters that the audience will actually be scared for. Washington and Pine don’t get much of a back story for their characters except for what is revealed during their journey, but the bond they eventually forge engages the audience enough for them to care about what happens to Barnes and Colson; the same is true for Rosario Dawson’s calm and collected yard master, Connie Hooper, and the various minor characters. Scott is good at fostering a kind of chemistry between two male actors in his films, and it is very evident in Unstoppable. Washington’s take on the veteran train engineer paints a picture of a loving father and a confident man. He’s a perfect foil to Pine’s sometimes vulnerable and sometimes brash young conductor, a man who’s only just starting a family and settling in to his new career. There aren’t many actors out there who won’t just fade into the background while acting alongside someone like Denzel Washington, but Pine holds his own here to put himself firmly back on the radar after his stint as James T. Kirk in last year’s Star Trek. Verdict: Unstoppable succeeds because Tony Scott delivers not just a movie, but rather an experience. It is a thrilling ride that should appeal to people who like their action movies with no frills, and is best seen in a cinema with an outstanding sound system. Rating: 8.5 out of 10 trains - GMANews.TV