Romantic's Blog

Starring : Denzel Washington, Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson
Genre : Action | Drama | Thriller

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Here's the thing about action-blockbuster director Tony Scott: You can't stop him; you can only hope to contain him. Which is to say, how good, or perhaps how tolerable, a movie he turns out all depends on the kind of material he has to work with, because in a sense he just doesn't care. If you give Scott a scenario that allows him to indulge his baser instincts -- as in that of 2004's "Man on Fire," with its too-skeevy villains; child-endangerment story line; rank, teddy bear-clutching sentimentality; and so on -- he will indulge them no end. This isn't so much of a problem when the whole point of the enterprise is indulgence of baser instincts, as with his hot-vampires feature debut "The Hunger" or his Quentin Tarantino-scripted nerd-fantasy-fulfillment exercise "True Romance." It can tend to ruin what could have been perfectly decent genre exercises such as "Top Gun" and "Days of Thunder," wherein the macho preening and production bling bring the b.s. quotient to near-toxic levels even among those inclined to be indulgent.

It is refreshing and welcome, then, that the story told in Scott's latest, "Unstoppable," which opens by announcing that it's based on fact (as if anyone in the film's target audience will be inclined to look up the actual events and vet the film for accuracy in adhering to them), allows little opportunity for preening or preaching or any other species of peripheral-to-the-action nonsense. It sets up its irresistible-force premise very neatly: goofy human error at a train yard sets an unmanned locomotive speeding on a track that winds through a bunch of highly populated areas. That locomotive's got a payload of very toxic stuff in the cars attached to it. And circumstances involving engineering and human failure leave it up to two reluctantly matched railroad employees, a veteran driver played by Tony Scott veteran star Denzel Washington, and a newbie conductor played by the latest Capt. Kirk, Chris Pine, to avoid, and then catch up to, the deadly potential WMD-on-rails, and bring it to the halt that the film's very title itself posits as ... impossible!

Once you get over the fact that these guys have the most dazzling teeth you've ever seen on any pair of guys working on the railroad, Washington and Pike make an appealing, engaging team. Plus, their respective backstories, while predictable (Washington's veteran is facing potential redundancy, while Pike's battling anger issues and misunderstandings at home) are limned convincingly enough to make you care, sort of, and efficiently enough that it doesn't matter much if you don't. Hewing to the tacit blockbuster rule that if you've got to have a lot of exposition to get where you need to be, you ought to get someone staggeringly attractive to deliver it (see Brad Pitt in "Ocean's Thirteen" for a male embodiment of this principle), plays the train dispatcher/overseer who lets us know just how the situation came to be as bad as it is, how it could get worse, and what can be done about it. Kevin Dunn is the not-entirely-evil rail exec who of course wants to cut corners, and compared to his function in the "Rosario DawsonTransformers" films, this must've been like Chekhov for him.

But never mind the human factors; the real stars of this film are the mechanical behemoths that zip and zoom and crash into cars and other things that unwisely end up in their paths, and that must be tamed, finally, by the charisma and courage of Denzel, with an assist from Pine. Scott handles the action and suspense aspects of this picture with customary élan. These days, when smash-bam-boom set pieces in big Hollywood pictures seem almost stroboscopic, Scott's version of quick-cutting seems practically classical. These days he's also messing around with little stutter-zooms for emphasis, but the great thing here is that as frantic as the action can become, it always parses (or seems to, which is finally all that counts). With its perhaps sincere respect for the working Joes whom circumstance can turn into heroes at any moment, "Unstoppable" is a movie that's all about getting the job done, no matter what that job happens to be in the course of a day. The movie, easily Scott's best since 1995's "Crimson Tide," does exactly that thing itself.