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Tuesday, April 26, 2011

BD impressions: Unstoppable

9:30 PM / BD Impressions / 6 Comments

The film: OK, how to put this politely? This is a big ol' pile of shit. It's a passable enough distraction up to a point, but it's easily the most brain-dead movie I've watched recently. I've got nothing against but stupid action films that simply require you to check your brain in at the door, and when Tony Scott's on the ball he does that sort of popcorn fare better than most, but this is not one of his better efforts. Once you dispense with the ridiculous clichés (they even trot out a carriage full of giggling schoolchildren), the script is actually incredibly one-note, and to sustain what is basically an incredibly uneventful story, Scott compensates for the fact that nothing particularly interesting is going on by throwing every MTV-style trick he can muster at the screen. If the camera isn't spinning 360 degrees round the actors, it's doing that infuriating jump-zoom at the start of every shot, and while the actors scream and shout about how dreadful the situation is, we're never really given any reason to care. Everything is told in the same screaming in-your-face style that what should be the dramatic high points fail to make any impact.

When I first heard about this film, the premise sounded too ridiculous to pass up, but in reality it lacks the "so bad it's good" quality that could have propelled this beyond mediocrity. I can't say it bored me and, at just over an hour and a half, it's at least short enough not to linger like a bad smell, but I can't really think of a single good reason to watch it. 5/10

Image quality: Another superlative effort from Fox. UNSTOPPABLE is a Tony Scott film through and through - frenetic handheld camerawork, excessively pumped colours and contrast, a heavy blanket of grain - but none of this causes so much as a hiccup for the encoder. It's not what I'd call a particularly attractive film, but it's reasonably safe to say it looks as good here as it possibly can on BD. 10/10

Unstoppable
studio: 20th Century Fox; disc country: UK; region code: BC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.39:1

6 Comments

 
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