Night Train (2009/I)

User Rating:

5.9/10   

Director:

Brian King

Writer:

Brian King (writer)

Release Date:

30 April 2009 (Taiwan)

Genre:

Action | Crime | Mystery | Thriller

Tagline:

Greed has its price.

Plot:

Two Passengers and the conductor discover that a person has passed away on their Night Train cabin. They come across valuable diamonds on his person...

Plot Keywords:

Train | Conductor | Corpse | Trunk | Breaking And Entering

Cast

Danny Glover	...	Miles
Leelee Sobieski	...	Chloe White
Steve Zahn	...	Peter Dobbs
Matthias Schweighöfer	...	Frankie (as Matthias Schweighoefer)
Takatsuna Mukai	...	Hiro
Togo Igawa	...	Yamashita
Richard O'Brien	...	Mrs. Froy
Jo Marr	...	Mr. Cairo
Constantine Gregory	...	Mr. Gutman
Harry Anichkin	...	Walter
Geoff Bell	...	Detective Melville
Luca Bercovici	...	Man
Marianne Stanicheva	...	Woman (as Mariana Stanisheva)
Dessi Morales	...	Nurse (as Desislava Nikolova-Morales)
Yana Atanasova Popova	...	Little Girl

MPAA:

Rated R for violent content and some language.

Runtime:

Netherlands:83 min

Country:

USA | Germany | Romania

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Certification:

USA:R | Australia:MA | Singapore:M18

Filming Locations:

Bulgaria

Company:

A-Mark Entertainment

Trivia:

The character names of Gutman (Constantine Gregory) and Cairo (Jo Marr) are direct homages to those played by Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon (1941).

Goofs:

Continuity: In a scene the old lady gets shot a few times, once in the head in the middle of her forehead. Then other characters are shown and then when the dead body of the old lady is shown again the she has no damage to her face whatsoever.

Movie Connections:

References The Lady Vanishes (1938)

The Corruption of the Soul

On a snowing Christmas Eve, a stranger embarks in the night train Nightingale at Fall Brook Station and has a heart attack after an overdose on pills and vodka. The medical student Chloe (Leelee Sobieski) and the drunken salesman Peter Dobbs (Steve Zahn) see a mysterious box with the stranger with valuable stones inside and convince the stiff conductor Miles (Danny Glover) to not report the death of the passenger and keep the box for them. Chloe chops the corpse with a cleaver; put the severed parts in a trunk and Peter and Miles dump it from a bridge into the Sturgeon River; however they do not succeed in opening the box. Therefore Chloe does not get off the train in Maple Creek, but the passenger Mr. Gutman (Constantine Gregory) embarks seeking out the stranger. He subdues the greedy trio and discloses that everyone that sees inside the box dies until the end of the day; but Peter accidentally kills him. When they have an unscheduled stop by the police that had found the body parts in the river, the number of corpses increases in a travel without return.

"Night Train" has an intriguing plot with a mysterious Pandora box that corrupts the soul of bizarre characters. The weird story has a promising beginning with black humor and an excellent character – Chloe – that is wasted to a collection of clichés in the end. Unfortunately the director and writer Brian King loses control and derails with his "Night Train" to a very deceptive conclusion without any explanation about the content of the mystical box. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Viagem Sem Volta" ("Travel Without Return")