Film Review - Unstoppable

Tony Scott's 2010 film Unstoppable (Twentieth Century Fox, 2010) stars Denzel Washington and Chris Pine as two downtrodden railway employees trying to stop a runaway train.

Frank (Washington) and Will (Pine) are respectively driver and conductor of a railway train on a routine journey. A mistake by the youthful and inexperienced Will puts him at odds with the experienced Frank and places them both in jeopardy when a driverless train is discovered speeding their way.

The monster locomotive and its load of toxic chemicals, accidentally unleashed from a railway yard by an underperforming worker, hurtles at breakneck speeds toward the small town where Will’s estranged family lives. As the remote and dysfunctional railway management unsuccessfully attempts to stop the half-mile long behemoth, the two workers must overcome the odds, their managers, and mutual antipathy, in a last-ditch bid to avert disaster.

Unstoppable is a film about working class heroes. With only days to enforced retirement the experienced Frank first saves his own train and then takes off in pursuit of the runaway. "You would risk your life for us?" an incredulous manager asks. "not for you", Frank replies.

The film presents a workplace - perhaps a whole economy - in chaos. Experienced workers are dumped a few years before retirement, on half benefits, and replaced by high-tech equipment and enthusiastic but inexperienced younger men. Under pressure, the inexperienced workers make a series of small mistakes with giant consequences that leave two trains hurtling toward each other on the same track. It is up to the divided workforce, symbolized in an evolving relationship between Frank and Will, to do what management cannot, and to save a small town from high tech disaster.

The characters are carefully drawn by writer Mark Bomback. Frank has two daughters, waitresses at a saucy Hooters restaurant franchise "working their way through college". Will’s estranged wife and young son are caught up in a fuss over suspected sexting, a hint of domestic violence, and an intervention order. New ways are colliding with the old, and the characters must accommodate those and overcome their own prejudices and fears before they can collaborate to stop the unstoppable.

The management types are barely drawn stereotypical offcuts from modern management manuals. A top company man speculates on the railway's share price from a golf course. Galvin (Kevin Dunn), the operations manager in a high-rise corner office, completely ignores his staff - including the competent but female local manager Connie (Rosario Dawson) - in favour of high tech outsourcing and expensive and big-noting contractors.

Hope springs only when the workers place their bodies between the runaway train and the small town it is hurtling toward.

Breathtaking stunts, stunning arial photography by Ben Seresin and seamlessly integrated CGI provide vivid panoramas for the story to unfold in. A half-mile train lifting its wheels from tracks as it speeds around a curve is a suitably impressive spectacle, especially with Denzel Washington leaping from carriage to carriage as Frank and Will attempt to avert catastrophe.

Unstoppable is a thoughtful film based in part on real events but in part also in the zeitgeist of modern economics and workplace restructuring and change. Those seem unstoppable, unless the old and new combine to produce something more. It is this something more that is evident in the story, and which lifts it above the ruck of the average disaster/disaster averted movie.