'Unstoppable': This ain't no Dinky

Unstoppable” is the latest brainchild of the ever-fruitful marriage between director Tony Scott and actor Denzel Washington, who together have made such action flicks as “Crimson Tide,” “Man on Fire” and “Deja Vu.”

Most recently, they worked on “The Taking of Pelham 123,” which featured a very hammy John Travolta hijacking a New York subway car. With “Unstoppable,” Scott switches from subterranean to above-ground transport to tell the story — loosely based on truth — of a train gone rogue.

Washington steps comfortably into the role he always plays: a calm and collected action hero who’s always steady in the face of danger. Frank Barnes, a 28-year veteran of the railway business, is a grounded and pragmatic union man. He doesn’t have much patience for the hotheaded newbie he’s assigned to work with, Will Colson (Chris Pine, who played Captain Kirk in the 2009 reboot of “Star Trek”), especially when so many other senior employees are losing their jobs. But not to worry; they’ll work out their differences — eventually.

Disaster strikes when a clumsy rail yard engineer makes a mistake attempting to move a train to a different track. Seeing that the switch isn’t set correctly, the engineer jumps out to fix it — only to realize he can’t get back on the speeding train. Oh well. At least it’s a low-speed “coaster,” right?

Turns out, the renegade locomotive is not a “coaster,” but a full-powered, 70-mile-per-hour “missile the size of the Chrysler Building” filled with molten phenol — and it’s headed straight for a train full of schoolchildren! After which it will fly off the tracks into a heavily populated city where it will cause in an orgy of fiery death and destruction! On the bright side, there aren’t any snakes on board.

Sounds over the top, but Tony Scott is able to hold it all within the limits of believability while making sure you’ll be holding your breath for all 98 tense minutes. Sure, it may seem ridiculous when police officers open fire on the train in a futile attempt to stop it — but that actually happened in real life, believe it or not.

Barnes and Colson end up chasing down the runaway train by setting their locomotive backward and trailing it along the main line. Along the way, there is the obligatory male bonding over shared women troubles: Barnes must deal with his motherless two teenage daughters, and Colson is frustrated with his wife and daughter. Working-class tensions are smoothed over in a Marxist unification against the evils of the corporate owners. After all, CEOs and the like are becoming popular bogeymen — here, after hearing the estimates on damage and harm to residents in the case of derailment, a cold executive asks, “And the resulting stock devaluation?”

But it’s not as if our two heroes have much of a soul, either. They’re two generically likeable men with generic difficulties in their personal lives. Rosario Dawson pitches in as a coolly competent railway dispatcher, but her role is also totally one-dimensional.

Instead, the real drama is found in the train, which almost becomes a character in itself: ominous and destructive. “Unstoppable” is also a finely crafted film, with tight camera angles, fast-moving shots and booming sounds. No computer-generated imagery was used, not even in the action scenes, which, when coupled with the vivid portrayals of the natural landscape, are absolutely mesmerizing. Scott has created not another throwaway action flick, but something more poetic: an ode to the monstrous, beautiful power of the iron horse.

4 Paws

Pros You’ll be on the edge of your seat the whole movie.

Cons The only truly developed character is a train.