The very premise of Unstoppable is what makes the film so monumentally silly. A runaway train, on tracks, speeding through various railroad stops — run for your lives! Or maybe just back up a few feet away from the tracks. I mean, what were you doing hanging out on train tracks, anyway? Which brings us to one of the many problems with Unstoppable. No matter how many times they show the train rumbling along, clanging your ear drums with all the might of Dolby Digital Sound, it is still firmly on the tracks. It’s not a hurricane, or zee Germans, or a credit default swap. It’s just a train, just a poor little vilified train, just a sad-sack locomotive that will never get to tell its side of the story on Oprah.

I should tell you the premise of the film, though the title Unstoppable pretty much does the job. Good on them, there. OK, plot time: Some fools break about five safety rules all at once, which causes an unmanned train to roll out with great haste. Denzel Washington and Chris Pine are working on on the railroad (all the livelong day) and are forced to react to this speedy train. Before this, it is made clear that Chris Pine is a rookie, while Denzel Washington is a grizzled train veteran. But no one, and I mean NO ONE, is at all prepared for the hellish FURY the train will unleash!

Ha ha, no, only kidding. The train pretty much just does train things. But man, what I wouldn’t give to see it bust through someone’s living room, Hi-C Kool-Aid style, just to see the look on their faces.

The train, after all, is an inanimate object. It’s not an angry train, or a sad train, or a train who had to eat school lunches. It’s just a giant hunk of metal set in motion by a cacophony of idiots. In that sense, it’s Transformers 3. There’s problem two: the train is not an active villain. It’s not the weather, a la Perfect Storm, or an Academy Award winner, a la Phil Seymour Hoffman in Mission Impossible 3. It’s just a train, a runaway train, never coming back. Whoops, wrong verse. Anyway, there’s nothing to rail against here (truly sorry for that one) or toot your horn about (less sorry for that one). So now we’re dealing with issues on multiple tracks (sigh), the lack of emotion that inanimate objects infuse into any given situation paired up with the whole “safely on the rails” aspect.

Step three in our continuing series on why “Unstoppable never gets started” is the momentum of the entire fiasco. This is a train put in motion entirely by humans, and so sending the other (courageous) humans to stop the train simply points out the disparate levels of education people receive. And you’ll start to wonder why this train, and trains in general, don’t have better safeguards. But then you figure, well, the person who accidentally sent it barreling down the tracks was a massive idiot. At which point you try to refocus on Denzel and Chris Pine, heroes they. But you can’t have it both ways, Unstoppable. Either incompetent people are a menace to any society that has train tracks or they are hero warrior eagles. But my personal emotion engine seizes right up (aw, c’mon!) when, within 10 seconds, we see foolish people doing foolish things bailed out by fellow employees.

Still, you have to admire the potential catchphrases that went unused:

This fall, STAY OFF THE TRACKS.

Unstoppable, so long as PEOPLE KEEP BUILDING RAILWAYS.

See Denzel Washington in his most STATIONARY ROLE!! (yes, including Crimson Tide)

NONE of us is as dumb as ALL of us: The real life story of how we (seriously) lost control of a train!

TRAINS: Almost as deadly as BEES!!

And so on and so forth.

Recap time!

Threefold problems present themselves here:

1. On the tracks.

2. No villain.

3. Human-caused problems.

So the movie is, relatively speaking, a disaster. Will you laugh at how the script maneuvers various protagonists onto the tracks to then “endanger” them? Sure. Will you marvel at how Denzel convinced someone to pay him $20 million clams to ride around in a train for a few weeks? Indeed. But this little monster has “2 a.m. HBO offering” written all over it. You’ll stumble in from a hard night of carousing, throw on the tele, and search your memory banks for why someone, anyone, thought it was a good idea to greenlight a film about a frickin’ runaway train.

Grade: D+

Tags: denzel washington, movie reviews, unstoppable