- UK release: November 2010
- Director: Tony Scott · Writer: Mark Bomback
- Studio / distributor: 20th Century Fox; Scott Free Productions
- Genre: Action thriller / disaster thriller · Runtime: 98 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Denzel Washington (Training Day, Man on Fire) as Frank Barnes; Chris Pine (Star Trek) as Will Colson; Rosario Dawson (Sin City) as Connie Hooper; Ethan Suplee (Remember the Titans) as Dewey; Kevin Dunn (Transformers) as Galvin
- IMDb: 6.8 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 87% critics / 72% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Tony Scott has spent the last decade making films that move, and several of them, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, Man on Fire, The Taking of Pelham 123, have put Denzel Washington somewhere in the engine room. Unstoppable is their fifth collaboration and the most stripped-down of the lot: a single mechanical problem, a clock, and a stretch of Pennsylvania track. There is no conspiracy to unravel and no villain with a plan. The antagonist is a train, and Scott treats it with the seriousness most directors reserve for an army.
The setup
A half-mile of unmanned freight, eight cars of it carrying molten phenol and other things you would rather not have leaking near a populated bend, gets loose in a rail yard through a lazy shortcut and a missed brake. Nobody is driving it, it is gathering speed, and the company’s first instinct is to protect itself rather than the towns in its path. Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington), an engineer with twenty-eight years and a forced early retirement on the horizon, and Will Colson (Chris Pine), a green conductor on his fourth day with a marriage in trouble, happen to be on the same line in the wrong direction. What starts as getting out of the way turns into the only plan left: chase the runaway down from behind and try to stop it before a curve rated for fifteen miles an hour tips it into a fuel depot.
The cast
Washington does the thing he does better than almost anyone, which is to make competence dramatic. Frank is not a hero in any showy sense; he is a man who knows trains, has been quietly discarded by the people he knows them for, and decides to do the job properly anyway. The grievance sits under the surface and never tips into speechifying. Pine, fresh off launching a younger Kirk, plays the resentment and the nerves of a man who suspects he has been hired to replace older men like Frank, and the two of them build a real working rapport in a cab that barely holds them. Rosario Dawson anchors the control room as the yardmaster who keeps telling head office the truth they do not want, and Kevin Dunn supplies the corporate cowardice the plot needs, weighing the share price against the body count. Nobody is asked to do more than the situation requires, and the film is better for the restraint.
The craft
This is Scott in lean mode, and it suits him. The hand-held cameras, the long lenses snatching the train through heat haze, the helicopter shots, the news-ticker cutaways, all of it is bent towards one feeling, which is that this object is too big and too heavy to stop and is getting closer to something soft. Ben Seresin shoots steel and rust and Pennsylvania grey beautifully, and Harry Gregson-Williams scores it without overplaying his hand. What impresses most is the clarity. A film about coupling speeds, siding switches and brake lines could lose an audience inside five minutes; instead the geography is always legible, the stakes always plain, and the tension comes from physics you understand rather than threats you are told to feel. At ninety-eight minutes it does not carry an ounce of fat.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Speed, another single-vehicle pressure cooker, and Unstoppable shares its discipline while swapping the bus’s improbable gadgetry for something that feels closer to real engineering. Runaway Train is the other ancestor, a bleaker, more existential take on the same nightmare. Set against Scott’s own recent Pelham 123, this is the tighter film: less talk, fewer subplots, more momentum. It is the rare modern action picture that trusts a concrete, physical problem to do the work, in the tradition of the better seventies disaster films, where competent people solve an escalating mechanical crisis under a falling clock.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have largely warmed to it, sitting around 87%, with the usual line being that it is formula executed with real skill. Audiences are a little cooler at 72%, which reads to me as people who wanted more than a chase and missed the point that the chase, done this cleanly, is plenty. The recurring criticism, that it is simple and heightened, is true and beside the matter. Simplicity is the achievement here. A more complicated Unstoppable would be a worse one.
Verdict
This is craftsmanship of a kind that gets undervalued because it looks easy. Scott takes one idea, refuses to dilute it, and wrings ninety-eight propulsive minutes out of momentum and competence. Washington and Pine are exactly right, the geography never blurs, and the whole thing is built to be watched again on a wet afternoon without losing a thing. It is not reaching for greatness and does not pretend to. As a piece of efficient, rewatchable action engineering it is close to ideal. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas from late November 2010.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Unstoppable turned out to be the final film Tony Scott completed before his death in 2012, which casts his last run of lean, kinetic thrillers in a more elegiac light and makes this confident, unfussy picture a fitting end point. It has settled into a reputation as one of his most purely enjoyable films and a high mark for the disaster-on-rails subgenre. It is now widely available on Blu-ray and digital, and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate threat, infrequent strong language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Threat and horror: Fear of the train hitting people or derailing and causing mass loss of life is present throughout, with moments of increased tension when characters have to attempt dangerous activities in the hope of stopping the machine.
Language: There is infrequent use of strong language (‘f**k’).
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
