Unstoppable

It’s a nail-biting race against time as an unmanned train carrying a load of lethal chemicals speeds out of control, and a conductor and engineer do everything in their power to keep it from derailing and killing tens of thousands of people. Denzel Washington leads the cast in Tony Scott’s tough-minded action thriller, in which a terrible circumstance forces a cThis ain’t training. In training they just give you an F. Out here you get killed.
ouple of ordinary men to become extraordinary heroes.

Matt
Rating: 3 out of 10

This is based on a true story. While moving a train in a station, a train depot worker forgot to switch the tracks, so he hops out  of the moving train and tries to hit the switch, but the train gets away from him. Man, would I hate to be that guy. I think this movie would have been more interesting if it was from their perspective — all the guilt and feeling of helplessness as this train lumbered on a path of destruction and mayhem. Sure, the heroes are cool and all, but they get stuck with bad hero-like dialogue, like: “This ain’t training. In training they just give you an F. Out here you get killed.”

The other part is, since it’s based on real events, it’s kind of anti-climactic since we know they stop the train (SPOILER) and the action parts are fictionalized and dramatized to cartoonish proportions that it actually takes away from the real bravery and guts these men displayed. This movie suffers from a lot. Bad dialogue and poor attempts at developing characters with talk about marital problems.

I will say that Denzel Washington is always good. But he’s better than this movie. There’s a lot of things better than this movie. Root canal for instance. 

Top Gun 2

Matt

As if they hadn’t made enough crappy sequels, prequels, remakes and reboots, “Top Gun” director Tony Scott wants to bring back his 1980s Airforce action flick in a sequel called — you guessed it — “Top Gun 2.” 

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer at Paramount Pictures is on board, naturally, and Tom Cruise is seriously interested. I don’t think this would be his best opportunity at redeeming his career. Perhaps he should give up worshipping aliens, or whatever the hell scientology nuts believe. 

Scott told hitflix.com in an exclusive interview — and I could not make this up people — that he got the idea for “Top Gun 2” from a drunken, half asleep 20-something who told him about his job flying unmanned drones.

“It was funny, because I was on a plane actually coming back from Vegas, rock climbing in Red Rock, and the guy sitting next to me was all hung over,” Scott said in the interview. “He must have been in his late 20’s and he was one of these kids. He said, ‘I partied all night.’  And I said, ‘What do you do?’  ‘I work [with unmanned aircraft in] the Air Force.’  But they operate these drones like it’s war games, but it’s for real.”

So let me get this straight… you want to do a sequel to a movie about fighter pilots that’s about planes that don’t use fighter pilots. Well, that’s just brilliant! Sign me up for advanced tickets!

Scott’s next film, called “Unstoppable,” is about two men played by Denzel Washington and Chris Pine who are trying to stop a runaway train. That sounds about as compelling as seeing Ice Man and Maverick taking their shirts off and playing volleyball again — although I don’t think Val Kilmer is quite up to task these days. This is just another example of Hollywood lacking any creativity and grasping at very thin straws to turn a buck. Even the Nintendo game “Top Gun” sucked.

Here’s Quentin Tarantino’s take on Top Gun. Enjoy!