Review of Unstoppable (2010) by Oliver S — 31 Dec 2011

Here is yet another slick, glossy, soulless entertainment, brought to you by one of our most prolific and eager hacks. The enthusiastic reception for this candy-coated offal is but another dismal sign about the current state of movie criticism. Then again, the people who rave about every mindless action film are not critics at all, just plain old reviewers out to please their masscult publications and Hollywood overseers.

I would love for a more enlightened viewer to tell me exactly what it is that this movie offers us that we haven't seen countless times before. The movie is so mechanically wedded to its plot, so full of stiff, functional dialogue, and so preoccupied with unnecessarily frantic visuals that it feels as if it were produced, written, directed, and acted by a team of cold, calculating automatons cynically programmed to deliver maximum box office returns while eliminating any vestigial brain matter from within the collective noggin the movie going public.

The characters almost entirely lack credibility. Chris Pine looks like a Beverly Hills Ken doll gone slumming, while Rosario Dawson's station manager looks like she should be modeling the latest in high fashion. Yes, even Washington, try as he might, cannot do much within the confines of his preordained two-dimensions other than deliver conversational drivel with his usual cockiness. Although nothing resembling an authentic exchange of human language takes place, Tony "the Hack" Scott's average shot length is barely half of a nanosecond, so that even the most trite interlocutory moments are prematurely rushed along with rapid cutting and other otiose visual obscenities, like his nauseating trademark zooms. The score mostly consists of one of those heavily distorted, video-gamish, it's-time-to-kick-ass guitar riffs played repeatedly each time our handsome heroes avow to stop the runaway train.

I won't begin to discuss the faulty logic of so much of the plot or bemoan the many cinematic abortions Scott has left us with in the past. Let all that I have written above suffice as a warning to my fellow man about what he will get himself into if determined to watch this emetic rubbish.

* One Star.