After Randy from My Name Is Earl (Ethan Suplee) loses control of an unmanned freight train full of toxic chemicals, it is up to veteran railroad engineer Frank (Denzel Washington) and rookie train conductor Will (Chris Pine) to prevent the biggest railway-based disaster since privatisation.
This 2010 disaster flick aims to do for trains what Speed did for buses and Con Air did for the US prison system, the problem being that a vacant runaway train only really poses a danger to people who have been tied to the tracks by dastardly villains or overzealous philosophers. Everyone else is more likely to be injured by accidentally treading on a hazardously placed Thomas the Tank Engine toy, or by the police who try to stop the train by shooting at it, than by the locomotive itself.
To stop viewers from switching over to something more exciting, such as live footage from the stalled construction of HS2, Unstoppable goes to comical lengths to raise the stakes through a series of action movie tropes, as our blue-collar heroes face down the grubby bureaucracy of the Francis Bourgeoisie. Frank is days from retirement, Will is dealing with a restraining order from his wife, and there’s even a trainload of children on a school trip – though their safety is quickly secured, in an anticlimactically narrow escape from the risk of anything actually happening.
Pretty-boy Pine is also miscast as a rough trainee from the wrong side of the tracks, while the ever-watchable Washington is given nothing to do and spends the entire film sitting down. Yardmaster Connie (Rosario Dawson) is the only character doing anything important from the confines of a control room that resembles a NASA command centre, her gutsy heroism somewhat undermined by offering to kiss both the male protagonists at the end. There are also no fewer than five people called Kevin in the cast. Now that’s a trade union with too much power.
Despite Tony Scott’s best efforts to shoot the train like it’s evil or freightening in some way, the action is derailed by a trundling scenario (albeit one based on a real incident) and a lumbering script that alternates between genre cliché and engineering babble; “What you’ll lose in counter-thrust you’ll compensate for in tractor force.” The outcome is not so much unstoppable as interminable.
