Unstoppable (***1/2)

Tony Scott (Top Gun, Crimson Tide, Déjà Vu) has more than two dozen directing credits, virtually all of them slick action movies and thrillers. Not all of them are good, and hardly any are great, but given the right script he can deliver the fast-paced suspense. Here, teamed with star Denzel Washington for the fifth time, he does. (The script, in this case, is by Mark Bomback, best known for Live Free or Die Hard). Oddly, Scott and Washington’s last movie, the remake Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, also featured a runaway train, though it was a subway train, not a massive cargo train. Washington again plays a regular blue-collar guy—the engineer—who unexpectedly finds himself in the midst of a disaster in the making.

Most action thrillers center around criminals wreaking havoc, but in reality the deadliest disasters are natural or accidental. Carelessness, not malice, sets this plot in motion. Sure there’s a villain—there always has to be a villain, I guess—but he’s a token, not that villainous and not that big a part of the story, just another part to the story. That’s what I liked about this, the way it’s missing a lot of cliché elements. When was the last time you saw an action thriller in which nobody even points a gun at anybody? (They do point one at the train, but that’s another story.) Another thing was that even though I don’t know anything about trains, it’s apparent that the people making the movie took care to learn something about them. As it happens, they hired Jon Hosfeld, a former CSX trainmaster, who once had to deal with a real-life situation similar to the one portrayed here.

So, we see all of the mistakes that set the train in motion, all of the ways everyone tries to respond, and all of the ways those ways might not work until a regular-guy engineer and a trainee (no pun intended) conductor (Chris Pine) find themselves in the best position to head off a horrible accident. Sound is used quite effectively—in the theater, you literally feel the power of thousands of tons of steel and cargo. Washington and Pine’s characters have a fictional backstory, but nothing too melodramatic. Yup, this just might be the best runaway train movie since Runaway Train.

IMDB link

viewed 11/4/10 at Ritz East and reviewed 11/12/10