Unstoppable is one of those movies that people immediately attack, calling it Wesley Snipes descent into video land and such. These are not entirely unfounded arguments, but I have to suggest that the badness of this movie may be magnified at least a little bit because it is so overshadowed by Blade 3 which, given the previews, looks to be a spectacular action movie. I have a feeling that Blade 3 will be something of a minor letdown, in the same way that The Matrix Revolutions was not quite as incredible as you thought, but still a cool action/sci-fi movie. Enter Unstoppable, and you have a sometimes boring and sometimes downright stupid action movie being given to fans who are just looking for something to tide them over until they can get another dose of gleeful vampire bloodletting.
The movie starts with a strange situation that turns into a good one. A bunch of guys have another guy strapped to a gurney in an ambulance racing down the street. The guy strapped down manages not only to kick the ambulance's rear doors open, but also to get away from the guys interrogating him, succeeding in rolling his gurney out the back of the ambulance, onto the road, and into the path of a tailgating truck. Oops. Pretty goofy, but at the later investigation, an arriving investigator finds out what happened and asks where the ambulance is, and learns that it didn't stop. I have to admit that's a pretty clever way to reveal that there were probably no EMTs in that ambulance.
There is later another similar impressive scene when the one guy captured from the diner shooting finally decides to cooperate. He tells Amy, the interrogating officer, that he will cooperate only with her, after having refused outright during the interrogation room, and while now being led away by FBI agents. He yells to her that these guys are not FBI and he'll talk to her, and ten seconds later several people have been shot and he's dead. Doesn't sound very impressive in writing, but these are actually some pretty clever scenes.
On the other hand, they are balanced out by some serious blunders, like the gigantic cliché of the rivalry between the police and the FBI. The only people who fight like they do in this movie are children, cats and dogs, and the FBI and CIA.
Take the diner scene, for example. Dean Cage, played by Wesley Snipes and not to be confused with Nicholas Cage or Dean Cain, goes to a diner to meet his girlfriend after leaving early from a self-help group for war veterans suffering from post traumatic stress. Turns out he just went to the wrong diner and sat at the wrong table at the wrong time, because there are a whole group of guys outside waiting to drug and capture someone who looks enough like him for them not to be able to tell the difference.
At first you may hesitate to believe that they could so easily misidentify their target, but the ineptitude with which they handle their operation allows me to believe all sorts of stupidity. One guy, for example, is so bad at being inconspicuous that Cage, while merely looking around waiting for his girlfriend, is able to spot him from inside a well lit diner while the guy is standing on the other side of the street at night. And if that wasn't bad enough, consider the sound guy, my favorite. After learning that his buddy has been spotted, he looks at Cage in the diner and sees that he is looking right at him, that he's been spotted, too.
Hey buddy, this is just a suggestion, but maybe you were spotted because of that LASER-GUIDED MICROPHONE you're using. A laser sight on a shotgun microphone is about the dumbest thing I've ever heard of, but that's not enough for this guy. He has to train the laser onto the window directly in front of Cage, so that he glances casually at the window, wondering why there's a little red light dancing there. Given his decorated military background, I would have thought he would have reacted a little differently to a laser sight pointed at him. And the best part was that when he curiously tapped the window, the sound guy gets such a loud roar in his headphones that he just about falls out of the car.
Wesley Snipes turns in a satisfactory performance, except for any scene where he thinks he's back in Bosnia and his friend is being tortured in front of him. His pleas for his captors to let him down and don't burn him and don't hurt him are about as emotional and frantic as if he was reading his shopping list. Is that really how he spoke to his captors when he was in Bosnia trying to get them to let his friend down? On the other hand, his hallucinations were done quite well. Throughout the movie there are some good scenes put together where Cage slips in and out of reality, thinking that the guys trying to interrogate him in the present time are his captors from Bosnia. With the exception of the scene where his girlfriend disappears in front of his eyes in the shower (I disappeared people on screen better than that when I was making short films at Fresno City College), a lot of these are actually done well.
Outside of the mistaken identity, the plot revolves around a top-secret drug that makes people completely susceptible to suggestion and also causes total synaptic melt-down within 6-8 hours of injection. Cage was injected in the diner early in the movie, and spends the rest of the movie reeling from the effects of it, while his girlfriend Amy, a highly overacting Jacqueline Obradors, tries to figure out what happened and then get the antidote. The old premise of getting the antidote before the poison kills the hero is a recipe for fake tension, but the closing scene is actually done pretty well here, too.
In the closing scene, the bad guy is also injected with the drug after the sale of a case of thousands of capsules of the drug and thousands of capsules of the antigen goes wrong. As Cage reaches for the single capsule of antigen on the ground in front of him, the whole case of the drug spills over, hiding it among thousands and thousands of capsules of the drug. Once the bad guy gets injected, he joins in the search, frantically grabbing handfuls of capsules looking for the right one, having forgotten that he has 6-8 hours before he really has to worry, as well as the fact that there is a huge case full of thousands and thousands of doses of the antidote sitting right there in his truck.
Another thing that this movie really has going against it is that the action scenes are just ludicrous. At one point, a guy is in a helicopter shooting a freaking gatling gun at people. He literally shoots tens of thousands of rounds and hits nothing. Cage responds, shooting three rounds from a handgun and succeeding in killing the guy and blowing up the helicopter. At another point a guy fires an Uzi at Amy and Cage from probably six feet away, spraying a stream of bullets at them and missing completely, or at least long enough for her to grab a handgun and make short work of him. What was he shooting at that allowed him to miss from that range?
So clearly, the movie has a lot of really bad but also some pretty good stuff in it, just unfortunately not quite as much good as bad. The two almost balance each other out, but still leave it below average. It is not, I have to say, as bad as many people have called it (the song over the end credits is worse than the entire movie, for example), but there is certainly a reason that it went straight to video. Maybe even several reasons.
The movie starts with a strange situation that turns into a good one. A bunch of guys have another guy strapped to a gurney in an ambulance racing down the street. The guy strapped down manages not only to kick the ambulance's rear doors open, but also to get away from the guys interrogating him, succeeding in rolling his gurney out the back of the ambulance, onto the road, and into the path of a tailgating truck. Oops. Pretty goofy, but at the later investigation, an arriving investigator finds out what happened and asks where the ambulance is, and learns that it didn't stop. I have to admit that's a pretty clever way to reveal that there were probably no EMTs in that ambulance.
There is later another similar impressive scene when the one guy captured from the diner shooting finally decides to cooperate. He tells Amy, the interrogating officer, that he will cooperate only with her, after having refused outright during the interrogation room, and while now being led away by FBI agents. He yells to her that these guys are not FBI and he'll talk to her, and ten seconds later several people have been shot and he's dead. Doesn't sound very impressive in writing, but these are actually some pretty clever scenes.
On the other hand, they are balanced out by some serious blunders, like the gigantic cliché of the rivalry between the police and the FBI. The only people who fight like they do in this movie are children, cats and dogs, and the FBI and CIA.
Take the diner scene, for example. Dean Cage, played by Wesley Snipes and not to be confused with Nicholas Cage or Dean Cain, goes to a diner to meet his girlfriend after leaving early from a self-help group for war veterans suffering from post traumatic stress. Turns out he just went to the wrong diner and sat at the wrong table at the wrong time, because there are a whole group of guys outside waiting to drug and capture someone who looks enough like him for them not to be able to tell the difference.
At first you may hesitate to believe that they could so easily misidentify their target, but the ineptitude with which they handle their operation allows me to believe all sorts of stupidity. One guy, for example, is so bad at being inconspicuous that Cage, while merely looking around waiting for his girlfriend, is able to spot him from inside a well lit diner while the guy is standing on the other side of the street at night. And if that wasn't bad enough, consider the sound guy, my favorite. After learning that his buddy has been spotted, he looks at Cage in the diner and sees that he is looking right at him, that he's been spotted, too.
Hey buddy, this is just a suggestion, but maybe you were spotted because of that LASER-GUIDED MICROPHONE you're using. A laser sight on a shotgun microphone is about the dumbest thing I've ever heard of, but that's not enough for this guy. He has to train the laser onto the window directly in front of Cage, so that he glances casually at the window, wondering why there's a little red light dancing there. Given his decorated military background, I would have thought he would have reacted a little differently to a laser sight pointed at him. And the best part was that when he curiously tapped the window, the sound guy gets such a loud roar in his headphones that he just about falls out of the car.
Wesley Snipes turns in a satisfactory performance, except for any scene where he thinks he's back in Bosnia and his friend is being tortured in front of him. His pleas for his captors to let him down and don't burn him and don't hurt him are about as emotional and frantic as if he was reading his shopping list. Is that really how he spoke to his captors when he was in Bosnia trying to get them to let his friend down? On the other hand, his hallucinations were done quite well. Throughout the movie there are some good scenes put together where Cage slips in and out of reality, thinking that the guys trying to interrogate him in the present time are his captors from Bosnia. With the exception of the scene where his girlfriend disappears in front of his eyes in the shower (I disappeared people on screen better than that when I was making short films at Fresno City College), a lot of these are actually done well.
Outside of the mistaken identity, the plot revolves around a top-secret drug that makes people completely susceptible to suggestion and also causes total synaptic melt-down within 6-8 hours of injection. Cage was injected in the diner early in the movie, and spends the rest of the movie reeling from the effects of it, while his girlfriend Amy, a highly overacting Jacqueline Obradors, tries to figure out what happened and then get the antidote. The old premise of getting the antidote before the poison kills the hero is a recipe for fake tension, but the closing scene is actually done pretty well here, too.
In the closing scene, the bad guy is also injected with the drug after the sale of a case of thousands of capsules of the drug and thousands of capsules of the antigen goes wrong. As Cage reaches for the single capsule of antigen on the ground in front of him, the whole case of the drug spills over, hiding it among thousands and thousands of capsules of the drug. Once the bad guy gets injected, he joins in the search, frantically grabbing handfuls of capsules looking for the right one, having forgotten that he has 6-8 hours before he really has to worry, as well as the fact that there is a huge case full of thousands and thousands of doses of the antidote sitting right there in his truck.
Another thing that this movie really has going against it is that the action scenes are just ludicrous. At one point, a guy is in a helicopter shooting a freaking gatling gun at people. He literally shoots tens of thousands of rounds and hits nothing. Cage responds, shooting three rounds from a handgun and succeeding in killing the guy and blowing up the helicopter. At another point a guy fires an Uzi at Amy and Cage from probably six feet away, spraying a stream of bullets at them and missing completely, or at least long enough for her to grab a handgun and make short work of him. What was he shooting at that allowed him to miss from that range?
So clearly, the movie has a lot of really bad but also some pretty good stuff in it, just unfortunately not quite as much good as bad. The two almost balance each other out, but still leave it below average. It is not, I have to say, as bad as many people have called it (the song over the end credits is worse than the entire movie, for example), but there is certainly a reason that it went straight to video. Maybe even several reasons.