He’s a sympathetic widower with two daughters and he comes with those traits all Denzel characters have-honesty, courage, forthrightness, fairness. All is forgiven!ĭenzel’s longtime veteran train engineer “Frank” is at least not a psycho. But his eyes crinkle just so and he has a pretty smile. He’s under a restraining order from his wife because he’s a psycho who flipped out when she was texting her sister-in-law and he ends up pulling a gun on a cop, who happens to be a mutual and long-time friend of his wife. He tries to blame Denzel for his mistake in putting too many train cars on their freight engine. He got his job courtesy his union-connected family. In fact, we have zero reason to like Pine’s rookie railroader, “Will Colson”. There is no character development in Unstoppable but Denzel and Pine manage to infuse their characters with winning personalities based solely on the brightness of their smiles and the crinkliness of their eyes. It made for a much more tolerable viewing experience since I could feel good about Dawson giving instructions to Denzel. She was, in fact, a strong, smart, capable woman in a figure of authority who actually knew what she was doing.
Which leads to her second strong point-her character wasn’t totally dumb. First, they got Rosario Dawson who is always great to watch and she does “exasperated woman surrounded by dumb men” very well. She has to be someone men and women will like despite whatever dumbass thing she may be doing at the time (movies like this don’t often spend time on developing real women as characters). He’s scruffy and kind of dirty and looks more attractive to me than he ever has before. Denzel is joined by Chris Pine ( Star Trek), who is growing on me and is quite likeable as a blue collar hero-type guy. Scott has this in the bag as he somehow keeps getting Denzel Washington to be in his awful movies (I suspect blackmail).
If you’re dead set on making a bad movie, which director Tony Scott ( The Taking of Pelham 123, Man on Fire) is pretty much always determined to do, there are certain ways to make the dreck more palatable to audiences. All around, Unstoppable was a pretty terrible movie. The score was annoying and cluttered up an already cluttered soundscape and the cinematography was the caliber of World’s Wildest Car Chases.
The acting was limited to roguish smiles and worried glances. It was loud, headache-inducing, teeth-rattling driving action with little plot and no character development. Watch this if you like kidnapping movies.Let’s be very clear. I would not rewatch this movie, only if someone would ask me to watch with them. The music is what I expect from these kind of movies a little bit dark and mysterious. The cast however is well picked, they were not the one to fail in my opinion, its the storyline and overal directing of this movie that had failed the cast. I didn't like it either that I saw some tiny movie mistakes (scene starts in the evening and the next shot is brigh day, too bad). I would have loved to see way more of Song Ji Ho's perspective instead of focussing on Ma Dong Seok (whom I love). The story wanted to intertwine too badly, there were scenes that were out of place in my opinion. To be honest the storyline isn't new or refreshing, but if executed well, this could be another 'man from nowhere' but it failed. Damn, I wanted to like this movie so bad but sadly I didn't.