Tony Scott’s ‘UNSTOPPABLE’ [7/10]

Published on: December 1st, 2010

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The Federal‘s runaway was historic … because, in the words of one veteran railroader who surveyed the scene, “It just couldn’t happen! Brake valves just don’t do those things!” Yet they did, twice on the same run! Railroaders will be debating about that for years to come. But they will also be recalling with probable pride that, thanks to a few brave and alert souls, death did not ride the rails that day!
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A Treasury of Railroad Folklore (1953)
B.A.Botkin & A.F.Harlow, p63
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As befits a son of Teesside – the area which gave the world, courtesy of George Stephenson, the steam locomotive – Tony Scott clearly has a thing about trains. Barely a year after his unfairly-maligned The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, one of whose key sequences featured a runaway subway car, here comes Unstoppable, which expands the same idea into a whole 98-minute movie.
   Scott clearly agrees with Orson Welles’ exclamation that the process of film-making is “the biggest electric train-set a boy ever had” – a statement which acknowledges that certain branch-lines of cinema are notably masculine, mechanical, and highly playful.
   Of course, Unstoppable is no mere whimsical indulgence for the 66-year-old director – as always, Scott’s impulses are primarily and aggressively commercial, designed squarely with the night-out-at-the-pictures multiplex audience in mind. And on that level, this tale of a runaway juggernaut speeding through Pennsylvania certainly delivers. Not only in terms of old-fashioned, slam-bang, B-movie entertainment (it’s Scott’s most purely satisfying outing since 2005′s unfairly-despised Domino) - but also as a twin-star vehicle for co-leads Chris Pine and Denzel Washington, as the blue-collar duo who inadvertently find themselves tasked with stopping the ‘unstoppable.’
   After an slightly ambling, character-exploring first reel, the picture quickly becomes a no-nonsense, relentless and stripped-down affair – one which, while dealing with an amusingly high-stakes scenario (the train is loaded with a hazardous, explosive substance and must somehow be slowed down before it negotiates a tricky elevated bend in a densely-populated urban area) is focussed tightly on the matter in hand.
   It’s a relief to find an action movie where the peril derives not from megalomaniac terrorists or vengeful villains, but from the hapless incompetence of a lowly, schlubby railroad employee (Kevin Smith favourite Ethan Suplee.) Admittedly, the chain of circumstances involved in the ’777′ becoming what’s described as “a missile the size of the Chrysler building” strains plausibility – likewise the death-defying derring-do which Messrs Pine and Washington must perform in the third act.
   But Mark Bomback’s script adheres surprisingly closely to its real-life source: the so-called ’Crazy Eights’ incident that took place across Ohio in 2001. And the presence of two roughly equal male leads does endow proceedings with a little more suspense than is usual for this kind of fare. Likewise it’s refreshing to see such an unfussy tribute to the valour of underpaid, underappreciated working-class Americans – and to a heavily industrialised, but still bleakly beautiful, corner of working-class America which is too seldom visited by mainstream productions.*
   We aren’t quite talking James Benning’s RR or Bill Daniel’s Who Is Bozo Texino? here, of course – for one thing, the picture is rather too overtly an extended advert for Fox News, as Scott repeatedly cuts to “live” TV coverage of the runaway-train incident in a repetitive, spoonfeeding show-and-tell manner that’s more Sesame Street than Paul Verhoeven. And given current economic and ecological realities, is it really such a good idea to present trains as so dangerous, uncontrollable and potentially lethal?
   Such qualms only fleetingly impinge on the experience of actually watching Unstoppable, however, easily outweighed by such consistent pleasures as Washington’s unrufflable charisma (his sixth collaboration with Scott), above-the-call-of-duty contributions from Rosario Dawson (who is to Unstoppable what Washington was to Pelham 1 2 3), and the sheer steamrollering force of a well-planned, well-executed train picture. Rather encouraging that, all these years after Stephenson’s Rocket, such old-school technology can still elicit such child-like – or should that be Orsonian – awe.

Neil Young
27th November, 2010 (rewrite 3rd Dec.)

UNSTOPPABLE
[7/10] : USA 2010 : Tony SCOTT : 98m
seen 25/Nov/10 at Odeon, Printworks, Manchester (£7.00) : {18/28}

Further reading : You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train – Christoph Huber’s review of Unstoppable, plus lively reader comments…

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*
(Akira) Kurosawa sought American financing because film-making in Japan was closed to him.
   Attracted by a Life magazine article about a railway accident in upstate New York, he wrote a script called The Runaway Train, to be shot in Rochester. Kurosawa travelled to the United States to hunt for locations and selected a spur from Syracuse to Albany for The Runaway Train. The film was to have been set in winter and would have been Kurosawa’s first work in color, although he intended the film to appear as if it were in black and white by focusing solely on snow and earth (an effect he would later achieve in Dersu Uzala); the only actual “color” was to have been the lights of the railway signals. When bad weather necessitated a postponement of the shooting of The Runaway Train, Fox immediately invited Kurosawa to direct the Japanese sequences of Tora! Tora! Tora!

Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa. p184