Forget Denzel Washington's blend of patrician cool and anti-establishmentarianism; forget Chris Pine's edgy daredevil intensity. Forget even Rosario Dawson's show-stealing turn as a stationmaster coping with her worst day ever.
The real star, cliched as it may be, of this latest outing form Tony Scott, is the train itself. Utterly uncompromising, relentless and even willful, it is, as Dawson's character says, "a missile the length of the Chrysler Building."
The assumed target of this unguided (unguideable) missile is the post-industrial backwater of Stanton, Pennsylvania, population: about 750K. when an astoundingly stupid employee lets the locomotive go unmanned, and without tieing the air brake links, its on.
The rail company is caught between the rock and hard place of sparing lives (threatened more by the 100 tons of hazardous industrial chemicals than by the 1 million ton train) and sparing its very costly transporter and its cargo. In true Tony Scott style, the lines are drawn hard and dark, the sub-plots neat and predictable (Pine's character has marital problems; Denzel is a widower coping with late-teen daughters).
Its left simply for the viewer to enjoy the tightening of the dramatic screws as the race against time approaches its conclusion. The train does its job - the faint-hearted will find themselves on the edge of their seats, but this runaway simply doesn't have enough to linger in the mind after the last stop is made.
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