Clint Eastwood is at the top of his game for about 10 action-packed minutes in which he directs a recreation of the events of Aug. 21, 2015, when three young American men thwarted a terrorist attack on a European train.
Airman Spencer Stone, Spc. Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler play themselves taking down an attacker (Ray Corasani), who’s armed with a knife, pistol, assault rifle and almost 300 rounds of ammunition. This unusual casting move boosts the action’s emotional heft, and those scenes are a tense, taut piece of filmmaking.
But in the remaining 83 minutes of this movie’s brief running time, Eastwood is at the very bottom of his game, interspersing quick cuts to the train ride with a thuddingly boring back story of average, slightly hyperactive kids who maintained a lifelong friendship.
He then caps it off with the most generic of backpacking tours through Europe. You can feel the director killing time, trying to stretch this thing out: Two of the young men debate over what gelato flavors to eat. (Stone picks hazelnut!) Countless selfies are taken. They go nightclubbing and wake up hung over.
Compelling drama it is not.
I found myself wondering if there was a script at all, or if the famously low-key Eastwood just asked the men to dredge up what they might have said to each other as they followed in the footsteps of every other tourist tromping through Rome, Venice and Amsterdam.
But there is a screenplay, by Dorothy Blyskal, and when it attempts to rise above the banal, it veers straight into cheese: “You ever feel like life is just catapulting you toward something?” says Stone, a bit of a yutz who’s always nursed dreams of heroism.
A brief illuminating moment sees him defying protocol during an active-shooter warning in military training, standing beside a door ready to shank someone with a ballpoint pen. He’s chided by his instructor, but we get it: Sometimes the yutz with romantic notions of himself is who you want on your train.
There are also childhood flashbacks. Perplexingly, a handful of comedic actors play the adults in the young boys’ lives: Jenna Fischer and Judy Greer play Stone and Skarlatos’ single moms, respectively — Anthony’s, for whatever reason, is completely disregarded. Tony Hale plays their gym teacher and Thomas Lennon their Christian school’s principal.
All are, presumably, just honored to be in an Eastwood film, because they’re not asked to do much more than be warm bodies with recognizable faces.
I find no fault with the three men, who come off as awfully nice people who did an amazing, courageous thing and deserve every gesture of gratitude that comes their way.
They’re not good actors, and why should they be? If Clint Eastwood asks you to play yourself in his movie, obviously you say yes. (Also playing themselves, in smaller roles, are Sorbonne professor Mark Moogalian, who was shot in the neck trying to stop the attacker, and British businessman Chris Norman, who helped tie up the terrorist.)
But minus its pivotal event, “The 15:17 to Paris” feels a lot like sitting through someone else’s endless photo slide show: Really only interesting to the people who lived it.