Movie review in the Friday, Nov. 12 Oregonian....
Director Tony Scott's runaway-train action flick "Unstoppable" is semi-remarkable for what it doesn't contain.
It has no mustache-twirling villain. Its heroes aren't particularly superheroic. It contains very little obvious CGI. It isn't frenetic or too ridiculously overblown.
Instead, it takes its time -- a strange thing to say about a 98-minute movie -- to plausibly set up a disaster scenario based very loosely on real events. A dumb miscalculation by a railyard employee (Ethan Suplee) sends an unmanned train loaded with molten phenol on a wild, increasingly destructive ride through Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, a rookie conductor (Chris Pine) and a cranky driver (Denzel Washington) in the runaway train's path grow annoyed with each other and the bureaucrats working the problem, and may or may not try out a few high-risk solutions of their own, with the help of a sympathetic dispatcher (Rosario Dawson) and a visiting federal inspector (Kevin Corrigan).
It's important not to oversell "Unstoppable." It's Tony Scott having earnest fun smacking around our nation's railway infrastructure -- between this and "Top Gun," he's the master of American steel, and of the smashing of it -- while throwing in some stripped-down mentor/mentee dynamics for the sake of drama. (He also has Washington's daughters working at a Hooter's for the sake of gratuity, though I'm told this detail came out of Scott's actual research with railroaders.) That said, Scott's execution of the formula is so confident that "Unstoppable" also happens to be one of the most straight-up entertaining popcorn flicks I've seen all year.
Pine cements his movie-star status by holding his own against Washington. Scott somehow keeps finding new ways (with cinematographer Ben Seresin) to shoot the two of them in an engine compartment, and also stages some of his best action scenes in a career full of them: The stunts here are metal-crushingly spectacular and refreshingly physical, and Scott doles them out sparingly enough that they're dramatic instead of merely noisy. The plainspoken story also becomes a nice little salute to can-do blue-collar knowhow -- to the men and woman who actually oil and drive and fix stuff while the rest of us watch TV.
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(98 min., rated PG-13 for sequences of action and peril, and some language) Grade: B-plus
'Unstoppable' (The Oregonian, Friday, Nov. 12, 2010)
It seems like they've made this same film about 10 times by now. They just changed the form of transportation.
Posted by: Model | November 22, 2010 at 05:34 AM
I saw this movie mostly for who starred and not for the story. I didn’t expect much but found myself gripping the arm rest and sitting on the edge of my seat throughout most of the movie.
Posted by: Unstoppable 2010 | December 14, 2010 at 05:39 AM