Unstoppable
Unstoppable ostensibly serves only to get hyper-active kids out of the house on winter’s cold afternoons.

It is both strange and frustrating that, for a respected actor with two academy awards under his belt, Denzel Washington has taken so few chances in his unvaried career. A specialist in thrillers, he is forever the wise, principled hero – always putting family first and dishing out astute advice to any naive, young bucks around him. This is a reasonable approximation of Washington in films like Man on Fire, Deja Vu and The Taking of Pelham 123; and his latest role as soon-to-be-redundant train engineer Frank Barnes in Unstoppable also comfortably fits this description. He does make a lot of money being this unadventurous (Washington currently commands around $20 million a film), but there seems little other reason why he couldn’t be a villain or even try his hand at comedy once in a while.

Having directed him in all the aforementioned films, perhaps Tony Scott is to blame for Washington’s unambitious appetite. Unstoppable is their fifth collaboration and Scott would have us believe that Washington has “always tapped into a different aspect of his personality” for roles in his films. Given that Unstoppable’s characters are so one-dimensional, it is very difficult to see how Washington could possibly have managed to do this.

Washington’s Frank Barnes has to suffer the indignity of training up the young, arrogant Will Colson (Chris Pine) to effectively take over his job after 28 years of service, but endeavours to finish his remaining days of work with professionalism and dignity. Onboard their train, the two discover they are coming head-to-head on the same line with an unmanned, 70 mile-an-hour freight train carrying a large amount of highly explosive gas. This runaway train (“effectively a missile the size of a sky-scraper”) also threatens to collide at different junctures with a train full of school children and the nearby town of Stanton. Stanton, unfortunately, is also where Barnes’s two daughters and Colson’s estranged wife and child live, which helps inspire their heroism.

If released five years ago, it’s possible Unstoppable’s explosive, runaway train would have been yet another terrorist weapon aimed at obliterating innocent Americans. Instead, basic human error is at fault for a potential catastrophe that is intensified callously by the greed of corporate bigwigs. Not so much post 9/11 film making, then, but post-Lehman Brothers film making. The relentless, deafening clanks, screeches and crashes of train-on-track are intermittently punctuated with proliferating media coverage – beginning locally before overflowing onto national news channels as the crisis deepens. Indeed, the way the film portrays the escalating media coverage is perhaps Scott’s greatest success here, even if the obligatory Fox News coverage manages to appear much more measured and restrained than the Fox News in real life (not many other news channels could claim to be more measured in their Hollywood portrayals).

Otherwise, despite Washington’s always likeable presence, this is a pretty forgettable film – even if it is “inspired by true events”. The script lacks wit and originality, and the characters’ back-stories are unsubtly shoehorned-in with the hope of a pulling some sort of emotional punch (they don’t). Scott’s films are certainly accomplished and make a lot of money, but with a directorial past that includes Top Gun and True Romance, artistically you have to wonder whether there’s any real point in Unstoppable’s existence. In the same way that a new Westlife album is aimed at keeping your mum happy on Mother’s Day, Unstoppable ostensibly serves only to get hyper-active kids out of the house on winter’s cold afternoons.