Unstoppable (2010)

After last year's "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3", Tony Scott and Denzel Washington once again tackle the subject of moving vehicles on tracks. This time the focus is a runaway train, and boy how they focus on it. So much that there is no more movie left besides that. The main character: the runaway train. The main plot: there is a runaway train. The main drama: there is a runaway train with highly flammable material that can derail and kill thousands of people in a highly populated area, or that can crash against incoming trains. The action: there is a runaway train that hits things causing big explosions, and there are people trying to jump on the train to get to the engine room to stop it. The two main characters are Denzel Washington and Chris Pine, and old and new railway workers, who due to circumstances set themselves after the runaway train. There is a little back drama here that the movie tries to show. Washington has lost a wife and has 2 daughters with whom he doesn't get along very well, and Pine has troubles with the wife. This allows for some attempt-at-human-scope scenes and some emotional phone calls, as the respective families watch the exploits on the television, due to the TV choppers that follow the action closely (but how the TV cameras can get some shots is beyond me). The fact that Washington's job is being put in peril due to the newcomer also tries to create some tension between the 2 man, but, thank God, the movie does not waste much time in that. They are also in constant radio contact with the central's chief, always beautiful Rosario Dawson. The drama scope is lame, but Scott is clever enough to leave that in the side lines and focus exclusively on the train. Off course that you know that they will eventually stop the train, so a lot of the drama/tension becomes inexistent. You just wait for the how they are going to do it. There are some plot holes but there is no use to dwell on that. I honestly cannot say if I liked this picture or not. It was watchable, but there was no real drama or story. Just a train. I don't know how I feel about watching a train go by for 100 minutes. As my fried said at the end: "you get the feeling the movie is over before having really begun". As far as runaway trains go, see the fabulous masterpiece "Runaway Train" from 1985. Here, the human drama of the 3 people that are stuck inside the train is handled in an amazing fashion. But on "Unstoppable" no one is inside the train. "It" is an entity on its own, and the rest of the characters just spend 100 minutes after it. Tony Scott and his action-eye-MTV-editing-style do the rest. And by the way, how did the train get out of control? The most stupid human error of all time. This is based on real events, so if this really happened, I hope the asshole got sued by everybody related to this incident and is now rotting in jail for life. But that is just wishful thinking...