Cinema Review: Unstoppable (2010)

To call Unstoppable a throwback might seem a stretch, but that's exactly what it is - a return to the 1980s/90s when the "High Concept" ruled, before the current obsession with superheroes and CGI excess. They were the years that produced the likes of Die Hard and Speed - crowd-pleasing action films set, superficially, in the real world. Unstoppable belongs to that same ilk, its high concept being as good, and a simple, as any of them: an unmanned freight train carrying deadly chemicals runs out of control and has to be stopped before it derails in a populated area. It's based on a real incident that happened in the US in 2001, albeit with the usual fictionalised embellishments. Behind the reigns is a man no stranger to the 80s era - Tony Scott, director of Top Gun. If in the years since his breakout he has lagged behind brother Ridley in the prestige stakes, he's arguably been more consistent, churning out enjoyable actioners at a commendable rate. That continues here: Unstoppable is clearly the work of a man who knows his craft.

Firstly, the script (by Mark Bomback, who's not done much to write home about before) gets the essentials right. There's sufficient backstory to flesh out our main characters just enough that they don't feel like the cardboard cutouts their descriptions suggest - Denzel Washington's veteran train engineer Frank, and Chris Pine's rookie conductor Will - but not too much to bog down the beginning of the film. Washington's laid-back gravitas meshes well with Pine's eager cockiness; the latter's impressive showing in Star Trek was apparently no fluke. In fact Unstoppable is a very lean film, milking the full potential its perfectly paced 98 minutes. It gets to the point, the runaway train, quickly, before building up the suspense in such a brilliantly sustained way that any longer would have become too exhausting to bear (and it would probably have deflated like an overloaded house of cards at any rate).

The most refreshing part is that Scott has apparently insisted on keeping everything as physical as possible in the effects department. There's either very little CGI used, or, more likely, there's a fair bit of CGI but the placement of it is judged well enough that it is rarely, if ever, noticeable. The stuntmen must have enjoyed their work on the picture as they get more to do here than in most films these days where computers can eliminate safety risks but simultaneously dampen the thrills. There's one stunt that looks real where a character is dangling between two railway carriages on the speeding train; it evokes images of the most famous stunt of them all, in John Ford's Stagecoach.

The director is also clearly well aware that he needs to keep the adrenaline pumping the whole time for the film to reach its potential, and to this end his camera is never stationary, injecting even a simple scene of talking with immediacy and urgency. His unmotivated crash-zooms do sometimes irritate, but it's a minor issue; there's none of the seizure-inducing experimentation seen in his divisive Domino. Scott here has precision-engineered ideal blockbuster fare: not too taxing but not dumb, outlandish but not ridiculous, melodramatic but not overwrought.



Summary
Unstoppable couldn't have been named better - it's unstoppably entertaining.