The 15:17 to Paris

  After Sully Eastwood turns to another exemplary American heroism, the three Americans who subdued a terrorist on a train to Paris. 

For a train drama remarkably little happens on the train. The Orient Express this isn’t. Eastwood rather spends the narrative on showing his three All-American lads growing up. 

They come together as mischievous schoolboys. Only one becomes a soldier but none hide behind bone-spurs. Alek’s and Anthony’s mothers reject the school’s recommendation of Ritalin to rein them in. Their adult heroism is thus clearly rooted in their maverick spirits from the get-go. This is the myth of American individualism. The outlaw spirit blossoms into the mature freedom-fighter. 

The film takes one important liberty: it omits the French citizen who initiated the attack on the terrorist, then spurned the French government’s honour for fear of reprisal. Here Carson takes the lead. Eastwood’s motive is not to protect the French guy but to make his Americans the effective heroes.

The film ends up a simple-minded exercise in patriotism. It avoids the moral dilemmas that deepened Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby. Eastwood shows bis usual efficiency in directing, but the whole project seems a toss-off. There’s even a laziness in his casting the real Spencer, Alek and Anthony as themselves. Eastwood didn’t bother to develop complex characters. He lets the “actors” be themselves. As a result, the slick surface lacks depth. 

This film makes no attempt to move from the particulars of a history into the resonance proper to fiction. This is what happened once — good, impressive — but it carries no wider meaning. It certainly doesn’t show even just America as a whole. 

This unimaginative recreation of an event makes Eastwood seem to be working in a bubble. It’s naive enough to have been made in 1935. It shows no awareness of the moral complexity around Carson’s military assignment, nor about the divisive and destructive tensions in current America. 

Eastwood retells his story without thinking about anything. He doesn't want us to either. It’s a knee-jerk repetition of American exceptionalism with no acknowledgment of the nation’s dark troubled waters. 

The three actors play such clean, courteous, idealized men that they seem to have stopped off a Norman Rockwell cover. The story may be true but it in no way represents America today. Odd that a true story can be used so to avoid reality. Eastwood turns a true story with the actual heroes into a fairy tale. 
       A longtime Republican himself, perhaps this is the only way Eastwood can say anything about the current situation: ignore it. Unfortunately, hiding from the nightmare doesn’t stop it.