No, it’s entirely down to Denzel Washington and Chris Pine, as a pair of bickering employees who’ve just met. Salvation, we can be fairly sure, does not lie in the hands of the train’s penny-pinching corporate owners, who make various measly attempts to halt its progress, with cavalier regard for the human and environmental fallout, in between golf strokes. “Call in a HazMat team!” Wait, what? That stands for hazardous materials - 777 is not only carrying flammable chemicals used in the production of glue, but is heading towards a hilarious elevated curve in the town of Stanton, bang next to which near-90°-bend some bright spark in the planning office chose to situate a entire farm of fuel tanks. “So now what the hell do we do?” bellows someone at least once. From here on, the entire cast starts shouting, and as anyone will know who’s ever seen a Tony Scott film, whether it’s Top Gun, Crimson Tide or one of the mangier Denzel Washington ones, this man is to shouting in the movies what Monet was to water lilies.
He’s left the gear in full throttle, and the brake slips, diabolically: it’s just a digit away from the sign of the beast, after all. We begin in the railyards of Pennsylvania, where the schlubby and gormless driver of number 777, whose name is Dewey, and who was therefore born to screw up his job, jumps out to switch tracks manually. Tony Scott trying to be clever (Domino) is not a pretty sight, whereas Tony Scott unleashing his arsenal of excitable tricks on a movie about a speedy driverless train is. Based on what they now like to call “actual” events, one suspects about as closely as Speed was based on research into the LA transit system, it exists in a satisfying zone between simplicity, laser-targeted technical proficiency, and giddy dumbness.
Tony Scott has been applying hyper-coloured flash to movies for three decades, but Unstoppable, his two-men-against-a-runaway-train logistical rollercoaster ride, is the first in some while where style and concept get on a treat.
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