Review of The 15:17 to Paris (2018) by Khaled M — 06 Mar 2018

It's a rough one, and probably not in the way that you are expecting. So back in 2015, there was a man who boarded a train headed to Paris who had the intention of ending as many human lives as possible in transit with an assault rifle.

That never happened, and this is the story of the three men that were able to prevent that as played by... themselves. Now I do support our troops as much as the next guy, but I am ready to call a spade a spade right out of the gates: this movie is a gigantic turkey.

The acts that these men did are inarguably heroic, and I sincerely doubt I would ever find myself even capable of doing such an extraordinary thing if I ever got put in a situation such as this one. On the off chance that I did, however, you know what I wouldn't do? Star in a movie about it, because I am well aware that I am not an actor.

Now you may have missed it back in 2012, but they actually did something similar with a little movie called Act of Valor. It had real life Navy SEALs playing their part in a covert mission, and it made you realize exactly why actors are so important.

If acting was easy, everyone would do it, but it is legitimately a craft that requires work and practice. Hollywood obviously didn't learn from their mistakes, because this is the same exact thing.

This movie is three films in one. The first is getting to know these soldiers as children. I thought it was ham-fisted and over-sentimental, but I stuck with it. Even though these are kids, they are still actual actors, so it is watchable.

The second movie is these soldiers going to training, namely Spencer Stone. It's not great, but still, I wasn't ready to write the film off just yet. The third movie is them backpacking across Europe, and that is when The 15:17 to Paris starts to lose points by the minute.

It gets downright painful to watch, and it makes you question if there was even a script to this or if it was just a shooting schedule. You haven't heard bad improvisation until you hear non-actors improvise, and it becomes glaring how little they had planned for the production of this.

For example, one of the guy's main characteristic is that he likes to take selfies... and that's it. Clint Eastwood has always been hit or miss for me as a director, and I think this is quite honestly his worst movie.

You wouldn't think that at 94 minutes you would have so much padding and filler, but this could have been condensed down to a 20 minute featurette and even then it would have been better with actual actors.

On top of it all, the entire reason why you are watching this is because you are promised a train terrorism thriller because that is what it is sold as. Not to be a spoiler, but that gets resolved in about five minutes (literally), and I wish that I was blowing this out of proportion.

The 15:17 to Paris is just uninteresting and it sincerely tried my patience.