by Louis Williams

Created on: January 05, 2011

Unstoppable

The train in question turns out not to be unstoppable. It stops literally in its tracks, but not before a monstrous hulabaloo and whole half hours of phony emotions. Despite its starring Denzel Washington, this movie reeks of made-for-TV.

That is, made-for-TV in the worst possible sense. “Rome,” after all, was made for TV, and we have been lucky to have it. It’s the same with “Nip, Tuck,” “Glee,” “The Wire,” and so many more — well told, well acted, intelligent series that deserved all the praise they’ve gotten.

“Unstoppable,” however, doesn’t run on diesel. It runs on treacle well laced with cliché. Denzel Washington is the old trainman at the end of his career; Chris Pine is the young trainman just starting out and is full of impatience and anger. They join up as engineer and conductor on what should be a milk run. Little do they know (corny, yes, but fitting) that miles down the track another train, run by two morons, is on its way toward them with neither of the morons on board. It is traveling at seventy miles an hour and is made up of cars containing enough toxic chemicals to poison Pennsylvania.

The powers that be call out the state troopers, and every other uniformed agency save, perhaps, the Brownies, to stop the train. Needless to say they all fail. They all fail because, in movies of this kind (call them disaster averted pictures), they always fail. The suits in the railway head office chew all the carpets they can find and spend a lot of time on telephones seeking information and issuing dire threats to the underlings at the other end of the line. There is much reporting by TV news outfits, many scenes in bars and diners of people who know either Washington or Pine cheering them on, because, every agency but the Brownies having failed, Washington and Pine and their locomotive are the only force able to do anything about the runaway train.

We are shown complication after complication, whole rooms full of people cheering everytime Washington and/or Pine gain an inch of power over fatally careening engine 777, TV reporters yammering themselves right out of their voices as they describe what’s going on, and Pine and Washington, who had started out at odds, coming (you knew they would) to respect and admire one another as they (especially Washington) show the suits that they know more about railroading than the suits even guessed existed.

What I’m saying is that, in spite of Washington’s presence, and the obviously well choreographed action sequences, this is pretty dreadful. There’s nothing here that the viewer hasn’t already seen. Think of “Independence Day,” “2012,” “The War of the Worlds,” and thirty or so other movies that give you the big disaster foiled, with many anxious glances at the ominous sky or, as here, the ominous place in the distance where the tracks curve out of sight. Will there be a happy ending? It never fails. Will the good guys prevail? They always do. Will broken marriages heal in the face of the disaster? Of course. Will father and child/children be reconciled? Naturally. Will the protagonists end surrounded by applauding hordes? Why ask?

Why ask any of this, because in movies of this type the treacle machine is working overtime and the scene, the rail yard, the county, the whole world, even to the starry heavens, are coated, inundated, by Karo.

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