Checked out the new Clint Eastwood film The 15:17 to Paris, the true story of a handful of people who took down a terrorist aboard a passenger train. The main angle on the film is that they hired the real heroes, not professional actors, to portary themselves. Unfortunately, their amateur acting status doesn’t help but isn’t the main problem with this rather dull film.
Before walking into the film, there was a sign that read, “No one will be seated during the thrilling ‘three tourists pick ice cream flavors from a store in Venice!’ scene.'” and there was another that read, “No one will be seated during the thrilling, ‘military convoy in Afghanistan realizes a soldier forgot his rucksack so they return to the Afghan village where he left it. They find it… but someone stole his cap’ scene”!
Yes, I’m kidding… but my point is that this is a 90 minute film with a lot of dull scenes before a decent 10-15 minute scene of heroism. The film jumps through time from when the heroes were kids, to their time in the military, and then backpacking through Europe. There are plenty of portents towards the future events peppered into these scenes but that didn’t make them any more interesting. I just had this long feeling that I’m watching a lot of filler to reach a 90 minute runtime.
The actors playing themselves are decent. You can tell they aren’t experts but it’s nice they do a decent enough job (and I am being charitable). It was neat to see them on stage with the French president getting their medals for heroism and knowing this is the real footage with the same guy who we’ve been watching for the past 90 minutes (in other words, they didn’t hired the French president to play himself in the movie).
What’s unfortunate is the kid actors who play them in school were pretty bad. There’s no excuse for this – the adults are playing themselves as novices, they could have scrounged up better kid actors (to be charitable, it’s possible no kid could realistically handle some of the bad dialog they had to perform).
So, overall, this is a pretty good short film front-loaded by a weirdly amateurish and boring seventy-five minutes. I’m sure it’s great for the guys who acted in it… they got to re-tour Europe on a movie studio’s dime. But for the rest of us, there wasn’t enough there there in watching someone else’s fun European trip.
Score: 66