Unstoppable

As pure popcorn entertainment, Unstoppable is really terrific. Yes, the screenplay could have been written by a software program, but the action is, well, unstoppable, and Denzel Washington wears his role like a comfortable old coat.

It probably helps that I was in the right frame of mind for this. I needed escapism, and Unstoppable gave it it to me. Directed by Tony Scott with the precision of a master carpenter (a character in the film constantly harps on precision, perhaps he was Scott's stand-in), the film gets rolling, literally, almost immediately, and stops about ninety minutes later when the train does.

Of course it's about a train. A careless railroad employee (played amusingly by Ethan Suplee, the dimwitted brother from My Name Is Earl) makes just enough mistakes to allow a thirty-nine car freight train to head off, unmanned, and without the proper breaks set. We then get a series of cliches that, depending on your current level of cynicism and/or taste, will either make you throw stuff at the screen or simply chuckle.

To start, there's a train full of schoolchildren that is directly in the train's path. Then we find out that there are several cars full of a toxic, combustible chemical. The head of the railyard is a principled woman (Eva Mendes), who butts heads with her corporate supervisor, a corpulent hatchet-man (Kevin Meany).

Meanwhile, our heroes are aboard another train, and they are introduced in the most obvious way possible. Denzel Washington is the veteran, who we later find out has only three weeks to go until forced retirement. Chris Pine is the rookie, who is resented by the others because he's in the union and they assume he got his job through nepotism. If that weren't enough, Washington is the widowed father of two Hooters' waitresses, and Pine is going through a rough patch with his wife. Both will end up making a heroic decision to try to save the city of Stanton (presumably a stand in for Pittsburgh) from getting hit by a "guided missile the size of the Chrysler Building."

Okay, so this thing doesn't stretch artistic boundaries. But damn it's fun. Washington and Pine have great chemistry together, and I liked Mendes, too. Lew Temple is a hoot as a pony-tailed welder who ends up helping save the day. And the action--whew! It really propels forward, just like the train, which is almost like a character. I could have done less with the all the news coverage--of course we get Washington's daughters and Pine's watching, their hearts in their throats--but Scott always goes back to the trains.

Unstoppable, I read, was based on an actual incident, and though dramatized a bit more than it actually happened (no one actually jumped out of a truck going seventy-five miles an hour onto an equally fast-moving train cab) it's close enough for comfort.