Denzel Washington in “Unstoppable.” (
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When I heard “Unstoppable” featured an object going 70 mph the wrong way, I assumed it was about the US economy. But this meaty, manly, metallurgical actioner — forged in Vulcan’s furnace and starring Capt. Kirk — more than lives up to its title. Get popcorn and flex your chomping muscles.
The movie is set in “Deer Hunter” Pennsylvania, a land of hard men and heavy work. On his first day on the job, error-prone newbie train driver Will (the prodigiously bland Chris Pine of “Star Trek”) butts heads with his veteran counterpart Frank (Denzel Washington), a guy who boasts “28 years of railroadin’.”
Meanwhile, nearby, a simple oversight leads to a freight train trundling out of the yard at 10 mph. No big deal. Except its throttle is open, it’s half a mile long and it’s pouring on speed as it heads for a certain and explosive derailment in the nearest city.
Starting with the workaday routine of ordinary slobs (this is the kind of movie where a fat guy with glasses equals menace to society), director Tony Scott assembles a thrilling max-velocity disaster flick, all moaning molten steel, roaring choppers and 500-ton cars getting crushed like so many Pringles. Soon, cops are trying to shoot the runaway train’s emergency brake button (located next to the fuel tank), one bravo is trying to leap aboard from a speeding pickup truck and another seeks to Spider-Man his way down to the loco locomotive with a rappelling rope from a helicopter.
Forget all that, fellas: The obvious solution is for Frank and Will to ignore orders from HQ, back their engine car up to the runaway’s tail at 70 mph, hook up and slam on the brakes. “We’re gonna run this bitch down!”
The downside is a slight risk of being turned into man-lasagna while, say, joining cables between cars or standing atop this “missile the size of the Chrysler Building” with arms raised in defiance of the gods a la Jon Voight at the end of “Runaway Train.”
I can’t decide whether Scott (“Top Gun,” “Déjà Vu” and last year’s trainiac flick “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3”) is the best of the bad directors or the worst of the good ones. It’s useless to point out his penchant for cliché; he lives in Formulatown and he’s happy there. With Scott, it’s always go time. Bring it on and step on it, and in case you miss the urgency everyone is constantly saying it’s go time, bring it on and step on it.
Capitalist goons in boardrooms (and on the golf course!) do cold cost-benefit analysis. They’re willing to risk a BP-on-rails if the alternative is a 30 percent drop in the stock price, and the exasperated rail yard chief (Rosario Dawson, who seems to be sitting at the same blinking-lights console Denzel used in “Pelham”) can’t talk them into the common-sense alternative of intentionally derailing the juggernaut.
Scott is a manic camera-swooper; even when two guys are just sitting down having a conversation, the frame is zinging around like a mosquito on Red Bull at a blood bank. Nor does anyone ever have to tell Scott to raise the stakes. Of course the wayward iron monster is loaded with enough toxins to turn the entire East Coast into a Superfund site, of course it’s headed around a tight turn where huge fuel tanks have also been strategically placed, of course it threatens to smash into another train loaded with schoolchildren. I was disappointed that Scott didn’t also put the train on a collision course with the White House, the Vatican and Buckingham Palace, but you have to save something for the sequel.
“The pin didn’t fall!” “Hold that dynamic at four!” “Hit that independent as hard as you can!” I have no idea what any of this means, but it certainly sounds like someone did their homework, and this, too, is pure Scott. “Unstoppable” is a crazy train, not a lazy train. Scott masters details because authenticity frees him to be ridiculous.
And he hurls himself into each new adventure as if on a mission to spare you a moment’s boredom. I wouldn’t want to see five movies like this one each week but it’s a cheeky, madcap joyride. “Unstoppable,” among recent action flicks — as Lisa Simpson once told Ralph Wiggum — I choo-choo-choose you.
kyle.smith@nypost.com