Movie of the Week - Unstoppable

This movie actually had us on the edge of our seats. Ok, it's a movie cliche, a runaway train, and it's filled with cliches. Denzel Washington plays the grizzled veteran who knows everything there is to know about trains. Chris Pine is the wet-behind-the-ears rookie who got his job because of family connections. There's an upper management guy who's forgotten his roots back in the rail yard and is more concerned with damage to company property than anything else.There's the plucky underling who thinks her boss (the aforementioned manager) is an ass and can't get her to just listen to her. And of course it's got a runaway train, an implacable force of nature.

And does that train go. It storms through the beautiful fall Pennsylvania countryside threatening destruction. And just down the tracks is Deadman's Curve (they didn't actually call it that) where the train is bound to derail, spilling it's deadly cargo from the elevated tracks into 100,000 gallon fuel tanks. Did they load the deck too much? Perhaps but it sure was fun to watch.

It all seemed so real. That's because all of the hardware were actual trains, not models. There were lots of real things moving on the screen. The train. Helicopters chasing it. Fire engines and police cars chasing it on parallel roads. Washington and Pine chasing it in another locomotive. It never stopped until the last few minutes. Go see it in the theaters. It may not have the same impact on your TV back home.