For their fifth outing together director Tony Scott pairs Denzel Washington with Star Trek star Chris Pine in this high-octane, low-impact adventure. Through his nonsensical ADD approach, he derails our characters in favor of capturing the barreling villain. We have no deranged criminal like John Travolta in his last blockbuster, Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 . Our enemy is a train with no brakes, filled with the toxic chemical molten phenol headed for a number of obstacles. Evocating Jaws on a track, this force has no intentions other than to destroy what is in its path, creating a unified motive for the audience to get involved. Our script from Mark Bomback (Live Free or Die Hard, Race to Witch Mountain) makes for a tight thriller, but it is our tired director that constantly devolves this story to the lowest common denominator.
This isn’t Domino-era Scott, but he stills believes unnecessary shots of helicopters, snap zooms, and flashy lights do more to captivate than actually building characters we can invest in when the stakes get raised. Bomback’s script has the standard trappings, forming our characters through their respective families. Pine is going through trouble with his wife, Washington has his two daughters. It’s simple to its core, but these actors have enough chemistry to make things interesting. It’s the cliches Scott employs that make this a frustrating experience. After a respectable opening in which train workers played by Ethan Suplee and T.J. Miller screw up and cause this train to begin its rampage, Scott’s repetitive antics kick in.
Instead of keeping us with our two charming leads, we go through a monotonous recurring cycle changing our point-of-view. An event involving a train and an obstacle will occur, involving dozens of unnecessary swooping camera angles. We then see those events captured and repeated on television, in a world where only FOX News exists. Then, we move to our control room featuring a perturbed Rosario Dawson throwing around phrases such as it’s “a missile the size of the Chrysler building!” to her uptight corporate boss, played by Kevin Dunn. For the first half of the film we cut to the unaware Pine and Washington partaking in cutesy banter; old veteran vs. the rowdy up-and-comer. During the second half when they become an integral part, we repeat all the above events and add in reactions from their families. Trying to pack in all these diversions only distracts from what could have been an expertly streamlined drama.
This structure isn’t the only thing that repeats. Scott’s shot choices are beyond baffling. He continually uses fast-moving, curved tracking shots around the train during low-key dialogue scenes between Pine and Washington. It nearly reaches Michael Bay-level hollowness and after the tenth time it wears on you. When it comes to the twentieth, you’ve just about given up. It gets as bad as Scott repeating exact shots, specifically one where a camera is placed underneath a moving train. Then comes the predictable smash cut to the barreling train at the conclusion of most sentences.
With all these qualms, Unstoppable manages to be an effective thrill ride a step above The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. The cheap, useless scare of the train running into another train full of children is thankfully over early on and once Pine and Washington join in on the fun, things really get moving. The ingenuity of the story is that no matter what human attempt is made to stop this force, it keeps going. It sounds like a trivial thing to point out, but this makes for no lull in the story (aside from a silly excursion at Hooters), and little break in action. Under a better director, this action could have been something extraordinary.
Unstoppable hits theaters November 12th.