Woogmoog

Review: Unstoppable

Tony Scott’s directorial output over the past decade has been rife with eye-bleedingly obnoxious symphonies of shakycam shenanigans and over-stylized mishmash. Among the most annoying offenders are his shots in which the camera dollies in a circle at ludicrous speed around something as innocuous as a character sitting at a computer or having a normal, irrelevant inside-voices conversation.

Suffice to say, I was not looking forward to Unstoppable. The last time Tony Scott played with a train set we ended up with the miserable The Taking of Pelham 123. Pelham 123’s opening scenes feature John Travolta in freeze-frame cosplaying as a member of the Village People and set against the dulcet tones of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems.” It is utterly ridiculous.

I braced myself against the seat, awaiting the inevitable wave of thumping bass, freeze frames and joyless camera-tossed-in-a-clothes-dryer action.

Jarringly, it didn’t come. Instead, Unstoppable’s title cards play over interesting shots of the train in question; filmed as some great metallic beast barely controlled by man. This is followed by rather lovely shots of small-town Pennsylvania train yards, railway bridges and the like.

The calm, idyllic opening actually makes it seem as though the movie could actually prove to be something worthwhile. It’s definitely a welcome change of pace from the jittery likes of Pelham, Domino, Déjà Vu et al. There are slower shots of quiet, working-class towns and working-class men and women wrangling giant machines.

However, once the “action” starts up you, the audience, are the collective mayor of Shakycamtown once more, and your world becomes a spinning migraine.

People tend to exaggerate Michael Bay’s over-the-top directing; Bay’s indulgences pale in comparison to the constant visual irritation of Scott’s. Unstoppable’s action sequences are bizarre impressionist pastiches of up-close shakiness and incongruous editing. Nothing that happens in one shot logically follows or matches with the next and it’s a real chore for the audience to try and piece out exactly what is going on.

Complicating this, nearly 90% of the movie is presented as faux breaking news footage, but even that fails to be immersive as the news presentations are riddled with Tony Scott-ified footage of a CGI-train flipping cars and smashing through horse-trailers. Either news crews in Tony Scott’s world place CG cameras right along the rails spinning and sputtering around, or something happened in editing somewhere along the way with Unstoppable and a decision was made to shoehorn most of the footage shot into local news overlays and graphics.

Unstoppable has a niggling insistence on stopping whatever little bit of momentum it builds up in order to toss in news report after news report, each one duller than the last. They serve only as exposition dumps to tell the next phase of the story or the next obstacle in our crazy train’s path. There’s no sort of statement on our 24-hour media consumer culture, no indictment or parody, they simply exist to avoid dead-air and get the train to the next thing it needs to crash into. Like most of Unstoppable, it’s all hollow and pointless.

A poorly executed story or series of set-pieces can be elevated by an excellent cast. Unfortunately, that’s not to be the case here. Denzel Washington is apparently not finished repaying Tony Scott’s Wookiee life-debt as this marks movie number five for the duo. Washington doesn’t exactly do much of anything outside of rehashing his working class schlub persona from Pelham.

As lovable as Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk was in last year’s Trek reboot, there’s none of that charm or charisma on display here. Pine plays a rookie conductor bumping heads with Denzel Washington’s veteran worker, and pretty much nothing happens beyond a couple scenes of dreary conversations for most of the movie.

These two new colleagues are forced to work together in order to save small-town Pennsylvania from the explosives-laden runaway train, but not until what’s probably 60% of the way through the film’s running time. Prior to this, we watch Washington and Pine shoot the shit and couple train cars. It’s not exactly dynamic stuff. These two are ostensibly our main characters but are passive and, frankly, missing from what feels like two thirds of the show.

Rounding out the cast is Rosario Dawson, who shouts into every radio and headset she can find that the train in question is “HALF A MILE LONG.” The usually-irascible Kevin Corrigan is terribly miscast as an exposition-spouting engineer hovering on the outskirts of the frame, occasionally interrupting Dawson’s “HALF A MILE LONG” tirades with random factoids to help out our heroes on the ground.

What this adds up to on the non-train side of this movie’s equation isn’t exactly mission control from Apollo 13; hell, the mission control parody in a recent episode of Community is more titillating than the dull teleconferencing action of Unstoppable. Unless you’ve got as much of a fetish for transit diagrams as Tony Scott seems to have, these characters pretty much don’t do anything either.

Really, no one in the movie does all that much of anything at all, and the movie’s a slogging bore because of it.

Ultimately, Unstoppable fails to be interesting on any level. There’s something to be said about an action movie in the Great Recession using rusting American industry as its setting, but unfortunately Unstoppable doesn’t seem interested in saying it.

Scott opts to make a movie that puts forth the bare minimum amount of effort to set up its characters and story. The relationship and rivalry between Pine and Washington never even gets close to simmering, and there are so many missed opportunities that could have been exploited regarding populist class warfare, racism, ageism, breathless 24-hour news coverage, or anything that could have made the characters or the movie engaging.

As mentioned above, the start of the movie features some great shots and sounds of the titular train. Had the movie continued along that route, this great hunk of bolts and steel could have made a great villain for our heroes to fight; instead all we get for a “villain” is Kevin Dunn having a conference call in his office. It’s boring and dull and pointless.

What you end up with is a movie whose climactic action sequence is Chris Pine hopping from a truck cab onto a train engine’s platform.

But it’s based on true events, you may be saying – why unnecessarily embellish a true event?

To say Unstoppable is loosely inspired by true events is a galling understatement. The actual event did not involve anything like dropping people out of helicopters, high speed chases, flipping police cars or crashing through trailers trapped at railroad crossings. There’s nothing really overtly wrong with this sort of stretching of actual events (see, for example, The Social Network) but it has to be done in service to an intriguing story, character or engaging and exciting action sequence. Unstoppable does none of these things and the result is a lifeless, uninteresting and boring movie.

BOTTOM LINE: Unwatchable. Powerless, passive characters and flipping cars, crashes and helicopters are conservatively sprinkled atop a huge, boring cake of faux-news footage. Save your money and spend two hours watching the local traffic/weather updates instead.

4.1/10