Movies that are based on quick paced real-world events, (in this case, a group of American tourists from the armed forces who took down a mad gunman on a Thalys Train from Amsterdam to Paris, an event which must have lasted less than an hour) are often faced with a kind of narrative dilemma. They can either showcase the story exactly as it transpired and go no further than that. In which case, they would be making a short film lasting at least thirty minutes or less. Alternatively, they can choose to expand the narrative to make it feature length. This method rarely works as what happens before the great moment in history is always going to be less impressive than the event being showcased in the film. Director Clint Eastwood tries to have it both ways with the bonus of getting the actual heroes to portray themselves and reenact the historical moment. Sadly, it doesn't go as well as he might have thought it would.
For those of you who don't know or need a quick refresher, in 2015, a lone gunman with nearly three hundred rounds of ammo armed with an assault rifle attempted what is believed to be a mass murder spree on a Thalys Train to Paris. Fortunately, the would-be murderer had a faulty weapon that would not fire and a spare pistol that had no ammo at all. This is when Airman First Class Spencer Stone, along with two of his best friends, took the opportunity to seize the gunman. After the ensuing confrontation Stone sustained a few injuries, and only one passenger was shot but not killed. For their valiant heroism, all involved parties received the Legion of Honor.
Before going any further, I would like to make it clear that I have a tremendous amount of respect for these men, as well as the armed forces as a whole. The people who chose to serve our country are braver than I can ever hope to be and I will always appreciate their service. With that said, this movie, The 15:17 to Paris, deserved to be a whole lot better.
As I said before, this movie tries to take a relatively short historical event and stretch it out into a feature-length narrative. It does this by making the film a semi-biography of the three American friends leading up to the main event. The problem is that the way the biographical stuff plays out is, simply put, uninteresting. When it's not coming off as a daytime soap opera with its melodramatic one-note characters, it's annoying you with side characters who all appear to have been made cartoonishly evil to make the main characters look better by comparison. All of which is not helped by the fact that the majority of this film has no conflict. Some minor conflicts are lasting most ten to twenty seconds, but they are very few and far in between.
Another source of the films tedium is the main cast. The big attraction of the film is that it cast the actual people who were involved in the historical event to reenact that day. Now, while I acknowledge that these guys are not actors and they tried their best to give a decent performance, the fact remains that they are not actors. Whatever coaching they received seems to have been very minimal because every moment they are on screen, minus the very end, they all appeared to have chosen one or two kinds of mannerisms to use for their "performance" and have just stuck with them for the whole film. This makes them less interesting to watch as their lack of range is just plain dull. Again, it is not their fault, they are not actors. Even knowing that going into the movie, it still drags the film down.
All of the film's misfortunes might have been salvaged if it had a director who was at all concerned about these sorts of things and made an effort to do something about them all. Unfortunately, this story was handled by Clint Eastwood, a director who, much like Ridley Scott, has seemingly fallen into the "I don't give a crap" camp of filmmakers. The problem with Clint Eastwood as a director, primarily in recent years, is that he is only concerned with presenting things exactly as they happened. A kind of "just the facts" attitude that refuses to allow any leeway for creative embellishments for the sake of creating a more exciting and cohesive narrative. This is not helped by how Clint Eastwood also gets politically aggressive with his films. To the point where it feels less like commentary and more like propaganda. It is the same style Clint Eastwood utilized for his movie American Sniper, a film so poorly put together that it didn't even deserve to get nominated for Best Picture.
The 15:17 to Paris Could have made a remarkable short film, or the primary event segments could have been used to staggering effect in a documentary. As it stands now, it's a dull slog of a film that leaves no lasting impression. These heroes deserved better than this.
Is this movie worth seeing?
No
Is it worth seeing in theaters?
No
Why?
It's dull, poorly put together, and has nothing interesting to say.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am TheNorm, thank you for reading.
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