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The Train Event

Tony Scott directing a movie about an unmanned, runaway train carrying toxic chemicals and barreling towards a populated area? Oh, okay. I mean, really, how can you go wrong? The veteran director of such macho staples as "Top Gun", "Days of Thunder" and "The Last Boy Scout" knows his way around an action movie. Plus, the casting of Denzel Washington as a veteran "railroader" seals the deal.

As if to add some gravitas to the proceedings, "Unstoppable" is pointedly "inspired by true events" - and sure enough, in 2001 an unmanned train carrying molten phenol rolled through northern Ohio before being stopped by two men in another train - but the well-studied script by Mark Bomback ("Live Free or Die Hard") is pure action-movie formula. The characters (if you can call them that) are quickly defined and the sides are just as quickly formed.

Frank and Will (Mr. Washington and Chris Pine) are a pair of Pennsylvania railroad workers assigned to an uneventful day of hauling cargo from one station to another. Frank is the seen-it-all veteran who can tell you the length of a train by eye. Will is the new kid (complete with reflective yellow vest) who may have gotten his job via nepotism. The two clash momentarily, but quickly establish an easy, blue collar rapport.

While Frank and Will go about their daily routine, miles away a series of (slightly believable) events causes a half-mile long train to lose its conductor while under power. Soon enough, it's barreling towards our heroes at 60 mph. To up the stakes, the train is carrying toxic chemicals (that pesky molten phenol) and headed toward Stanton (no!), a southern Pennsylvania town of 750,000 people.

Naturally, only Frank and Will can save the day: Frank with his inherent understanding of train behavior, and Will with his brawny, can-do bravado. They have an ally in the form of Rosario Dawson's plucky dispatcher, and a foil in Kevin Dunn's bumbling corporate exec who, of course, gets every decision wrong while impotently yelling "you're fired!" Ms. Dawson acquits herself well, though she remains stuck behind a microphone (as Mr. Washington was in the remake of "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3", across directed by Mr. Scott).

For Mr. Washington, well, despite the material, this is no "Training Day" (pun very much intended); he could do this role in his sleep. He throws out his lines with an easy charm and turns on his thousand-watt smile as necessary. Likewise, Mr. Pine makes sure to remain unshaven and smolder as needed. Both actors enjoy small, easily-resolvable back-stories to add an extra pinch of depth their jobs.

It's comforting when your expectations are met; "Unstoppable" was never going to be a great movie. With perfectly absurd lines like, "This isn't a train; it's a missile" and "You're talking about a train the size of the Chrysler Building!", the film provides exactly what a popcorn-movie should and nothing more. And like a kid given the world's biggest train set, Mr. Scott has a great time with extreme close-ups of the enormous engines.

Ironically, the film's ending could have been bigger, but I respect that Mr. Scott kept the film grounded rather than amping up the climax to some kind of Michael Bay sequence involving Will running across the top of the train as the cars go over a cliff in a fiery wreck. Still, for a film called "Unstoppable" (rather than, say, "Runaway Train"), it ends pretty easily.