In "Pelham," Washington played a courtly, sarcastic, vaguely troubled family man, while here he - oh, forget it. (OK, she's the other nonwhite person in Pennsylvania.) The suit-wearing overlord who wants to cover the whole thing up, James Gandolfini in "Pelham," is Kevin Dunn in the new movie, while Kevin Corrigan plays the officious, semi-helpful expert role, inhabited last year by John Turturro. The wearing-headphones-and-explaining-everything role, which belonged to Washington in "Pelham," goes to the ever-appealing Rosario Dawson here. The train in Exhibit A was mostly stationary, while the train in Exhibit B is hauling ass, along with several carloads of an unstable and dangerous compound called molten phenol. "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3" invoked clichés about ungovernable and corrupt big-city America, while "Unstoppable" invokes clichés about rock-solid, if dumbass, rural America. Let's enumerate the important differences. Now, in case you're wondering, you didn't imagine it: Scott and Washington really did just make a train movie, and here they are with another one. (It wouldn't be a Tony Scott film without lecherous background details.) The fictional Pennsylvania towns endangered by the runaway train loaded with toxic chemicals appear to be entirely Caucasian, except of course for Frank, the grumpy-charismatic train engineer played by Denzel Washington, who has a pair of hawt teenage daughters working their shift at Hooters on the day he faces death. Like so many American movies these days, "Unstoppable" is a semi-conscious nostalgic fantasy, set in an imaginary version of Middle America where the Industrial Age never ended and the immigrants (or at least the non-white ones) never showed up. If you want to argue that "Unstoppable" is about anything beyond provoking a Pavlovian drug-addict response from the audience, then it's about men and their machines, both portrayed at least as lovingly as in those Soviet boy-meets-locomotive movies that Scott probably saw in film school in London, 130 years ago.
It pays only the most cursory attention to old-fashioned stuff like plot and characters, and who needs those when you've got "a missile the size of the Chrysler Building," as someone helpfully explains, threatening to wipe out an entire Pennsylvania city?
It's got all the ADHD camerawork, aerial photography, compulsive jump cuts and smeary, digitally enhanced colors that Scott relies on to make his Hollywood hackwork seem fresh and contemporary. If a movie can be both exciting and boring at the same time, that movie would be "Unstoppable," an adrenaline-infused runaway-train flick that perfectly distills director Tony Scott's talents and limitations.