By Daniel Cohen, Santa Monica Reporter
Unstoppable is a 100 million dollar B movie. Its plot line, and every digression from the device that drives it, a runaway freight train loaded with hazardous chemicals, feels like it was cribbed from an undergraduate screenwriting text. There isn’t a single beat that isn’t telegraphed from miles down the track. And still, the movie is exciting.
Fox, the studio responsible, was wise in recruiting Tony Scott to pilot the project. Brother of Ridley, and a partner in Scott Free, one of Hollywood’s best production houses, the veteran director avoided the by now glossy but predictable computer graphics studios routinely employ in the service of their mid level action films. Instead he went for a gritty, industrial motif that adds to the tension. How much is computer generated and how much actually staged? You can’t tell, and that’s good.
Scott was also wise to keep the back stories, which are mired in predictable domestic strife, as far in the background as the labored script allows. You never really care about the wives, daughters and others who watch from the sidelines. Nor should you, since they’re never in any jeopardy. The movie is about mistakes, collisions, heroics, and star power.
But none of this came cheap. Consider this: each minute of “Unstoppable’s” running time cost about a million bucks. The talent; Denzel Washington, who commands 20 million a movie, and Chris Pine, a newly minted superstar from the rebooted “Star Trek,” raise the projects profile, but also the financial stakes. Years ago the studios birthed a couple dozen of these movies a year. Now they’re the tent poles they rely on to keep them solvent.
Word from inside alleges that Fox squeezed five million from Washington’s usual take, which they probably mitigated with the promise of a big slice of the box office, from dollar one. Scott, a big ticket talent with a long string of hits to his credit, from “Top Gun,” to “Man on Fire,” no doubt added considerably to the price tag. But they both perform reliably. Pine, now married to a deathless sci-fi franchise, is here saddled with the kind of colorless role a half dozen upcoming actors have played and survived; fielding Washington’s sarcasm. He bears up reasonably well.
Before they even set up shop at the rust belt Pennsylvania locations, the tab for this production was probably well over thirty million. Happily the rest of the money is on the screen, in the large scale wrecks that goose the audience for almost the entire hour and forty minute running time.
It helps that the basic situation, inspired by a near catastrophe in 2001, feels and looks truthful. The problem is that the manufactured dramatics, from Chris Pine’s marital woes, to Denzel’s retirement issues, contribute little or nothing to the tension. They’re as irritating as the near to real names given the small towns and cities menaced by the rampaging steel beast. “Scranton,” for example, has been recast as “Stanton,” and repeated ad nauseum in the endless foreboding speeches and newscasts, which are supposed to increase the tension, but actually make it feel synthetic. For some reason, probably legal, screenwriter Mark Bomback, author of the most recent in the “Die Hard” series, has mashed up Pennsylvania with Ohio, where the real story occurred. This is a needling distraction to those of us who know the state.
When it sticks to the rails “Unstoppable” runs hard and fast. But back in the offices, where the lovely Rosario Dawson and the underused Kevin Corrigan are tethered to desks and video monitors, it defuses. There’s also a risible, totally unnecessary detour involving a train full of school kids. Going into this, does anybody really think this ill timed field trip is going to end in a large body count? Let’s see a show of hands.
A note:
Clint Eastwood’s remarkable, under loved “Hereafter,” continues on at least one local screen. So you still have a chance to see one of the best adult dramas of the year in a proper movie house, where it belongs. I’ll discuss this movie at length, either in a year end wrap up, or as part of a dvd review. But for now, go see it.
