UNSTOPPABLE (Fox, 2010) D: Tony Scott, w/ Denzel Washington, Chris Pine. Rating: NNN DVD package: NNNNN Rating: NNN
Unstoppable doesn’t have enough depth to get your ankles wet, but it whips along with so much kinetic energy and visual flair that you’ll barely notice.
The story is bone-simple: human error sends a driverless train with a combustible cargo hurtling across Pennsylvania. All attempts to stop it fail until a veteran engineer and novice conductor give chase.
Denzel Washington, the engineer, Chris Pine, the conductor, and the rest of the cast are thoroughly credible as working people dealing with a potential disaster, but the real stars are the trains. Director Tony Scott shoots them from every conceivable angle, always with moving cameras and often from helicopters. You can feel every one of those 100,000 tons of runaway steel, which lends a sense of genuine danger to the stunts.
Scott’s commentary and the making-of doc make it clear that almost everything in the movie is old-school – there’s no green screen, very little CG. The kicker in the extras package is an excellent look at the writer/director relationship via an audio track of a working session between Scott and writer Mark Bomback. They bounce ideas around, tweaking the script and finding meaning in the just-right placement of tiny details.
EXTRAS Commentary, writer/director conversations, making-of doc. Widescreen. English, French, Spanish audio. English, Spanish subtitles.
