Atomic Train (1999)

If you want a considered, thoughtful movie about the dangers of transporting nuclear waste, don't bother.If you want a few hours of mindless fun, explosions, "drama," cheesy special effects and "Denver" biting it, then you're good.The plot holes are huge, the script weak, the situation completely unrealistic and the special effects are what you'd expect for early-200s television. But it's fun. I enjoyed it. I liked seeing Kristen Davis in a role completely different than her "Sex and the City" role (she actually kicks a little butt and has a nice no-BS attitude). And I'm always up for a fun disaster movie. Worth watching if you've got nothing better to do on a dreary Sunday afternoon.

You've heard of dark territory. In ATOMIC TRAIN, welcome to stupid territory. A nuclear device is aboard a runaway train headed for Denver, and it is up to Rob Lowe (!) to save everyone. A fun movie to watch in part for the inept acting and implausible plot, ATOMIC TRAIN is longer than the train itself, and runs for what seems like endless hours. You know Lowe isn't going to die, so it becomes a game to see how often the scripters can put his life in peril. We also know the bomb cannot blow up simply by crashing the train, so we watch bemusedly as everyone frets and runs riot, thinking they are going to die. Watch it for Lowe, if no other reason. He acts his little heart out.

This is a very long film and I would have to write a book about it to do it justice. Instead, I have decided to make a few observations about particular aspects of the film which amused me.a) John Seger (Rob Lowe) - It is abundantly clear from the moment this character appears that he is destined to become the hero of the film on the basis of his good looks. Unfortunately, he does absolutely nothing to justify his status as the hero. For no reason, he, a train wreck investigator, is airlifted onto a moving train with a nuclear weapon on board. He then proceeds to do nothing to prevent the impending disaster. The director is so desperate to make him look like a hero that, in one extraordinary scene, he stands at the front of the train pulling faces and shouting as if this is going to slow the train down. Nevertheless his pointless antics earn him a phone call from the President of the USA (no less) who congratulates him presumably for being the best looking guy on the train. Needless to say, the train driver and various mechanics, who have risked their lives making genuine efforts to stop the train, receive no thanks at all - after all - they're ugly.b) Interestingly the nuke actually goes off in this film and, as one would expect, all of the main characters survive the blast.c) Watch out for the moment where it is announced on a large TV screen in Denver that a bomb is destined for the city. Instantaneously, people start throwing dustbins through shop windows and stealing TVs... why???? This film is hilarious and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys train movies as a genre.

In all honesty, I have to express my sympathies to Lowe, Davis, Morales, Suvari, and all the others involved in this cinematic debacle--either the paychecks just weren't rolling in, or they were conned into thinking this script had potential. I just saw it on TV, and I would have laughed a LOT, had it just not been so tragic and head-shakingly bad.I'm an actor and director, so I can speak to the quality of their performances, which were very good, considering the material they were given and the direction and production values and hideously implausible script. I would have loved to see more conflict between Lowe and Morales, and I could tell they were itching to inject it into their performances, but the script and production prevented any meaningful characterizations from coming out.I'm also a moderate geek, so I can state some disputes with the story which destroyed my suspension of disbelief from the first moment of the film. Buses don't move and stop that quickly. Trains don't zip along that fast without camera tricks. Air brakes, of the kind used on every train and commercial tractor-trailer vehicle in existence, by design, lock up tight as a drum when air pressure is lost. And these are all within the first few minutes. I lost track of all the technical non-sequiturs and outright lousy whiskey-tango-foxtrot moments early on, and came to the conclusion that the writers and producers had but a nodding acquaintance with reality and know no fact-checkers. I won't even get into the fact that no one of our erstwhile heroes should have been left alive after around the halfway point.Why the writers chose to make this flick run as long as it did...the mind lacks the courage to boggle. There's no legitimate climax to the film. What should have been the climax, the obvious 'boom', was reduced to a simple complication in the tale. from there, it was up-and-down rising action and denouement, leaving no fulfillment, only a feeling through the last third of the film of, "Dear God in Heaven, isn't this bloody thing over YET!?" No satisfaction from the resolution, no standout performances, no tour-de-force effects work (it was serviceable to the story...and that ain't a compliment), no plausibility, only a numbness and a feeling of having lost several hours, possibly an entire day, to a script that never should have gotten the green light.Thank heavens the marquis names have moved on to bigger and better projects and made names for themselves, so they can say that they've all dodged the career-killing Atomic Train bullet.