Runaway train movie. Surprisingly there’s no evil plan by a criminal mastermind to steal the train for terroristic purposes, just an incredibly dumb move by Ethan “It’s Not a Schooner” Suplee that sets a train with explosive cargo at full throttle with no driver or brakes.

Suplee, typecast as an idiot:

The final of around 20 features Tony Scott made. I saw a string of his 90’s movies: The Last Boy Scout, True Romance, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, then tried to avoid him, but after his death Mubi cranked the level of their Scott-appreciation posts to unavoidable levels (see: my rant at the top of Death Race) so I reluctantly rented this for a memorial screening. Verdict: he’s very good at putting together a high-energy sweeping-camera-movements action scene with lots of blur-motion without sacrificing clarity – a rare and valuable skill. But it’s impossible to watch his particular brand of straightfaced action after seeing Hot Fuzz, which perfectly parodies this sort of thing. And despite the skill behind the camera and two top-notch lead actors, it’s pretty slight for a big action film: the nearly-real-time, based-on-true-events story of a veteran and a rookie train operator who manage to stop a runaway train.

Also there are lots of helicopters:

Denzel Washington and Chris Pine are earnest characters who we want to succeed (yay!), watched closely (via TV news coverage) by Denzel’s daughters and Chris’s estranged wife. Their manager Rosario Dawson and a helpful inspector (Kevin Corrigan, Jerry Rubin in Steal This Movie) and a truck-drivin’ dude named Ned are risking lives or careers trying to help stop the disaster (yay!) while some corporate boss (Kevin Dunn, Shia’s shameful dad in the Transformers movies) tries to minimize financial risk to the train company (boo!) and Schooner Suplee (boo!) prays his blunder won’t kill thousands of people.

From the writer of the fourth Die Hard and the Total Recall remake.