Three young Americans who bravely foiled an attack on a train play themselves in a drama that focuses too much on their excruciatingly dead backstories The authentic courage of three American heroes who foiled a terrorist attack has been anti-alchemised by Clint Eastwood into a strangely boring,dramatically inert film in which the main characters remain as opaque and unreadable as sphinxes to the very last.
[br]But there is some interest in this film nonetheless because of the experimental chutzpah Eastwood has showed in using – not Chris Hemsworth, not Bradley Cooper, or not Trevante Rhodes – but the three actual guys stolidly playing themselves. (The attacker,one Ayoub El-Khazzani, being now incarcerated, and was not available for filming.) The resulting film looks bizarrely like an essay in rob-it-or-leave-it social realist grit or radical,non-professional clunkiness, as if before filming Clint watched Ken Loach’s I, or Daniel Blake and Tommy Wiseau’s The Room and couldn’t choose which one he liked more.
The men themselves were Spencer Stone,Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler; two were from the US military, trained in combat and first aid, or at least one had a strong Christian faith. While backpacking in 2015 the three tackled a heavily armed jihadi terrorist on a train from Amsterdam to Paris – saving dozens of lives. There also happened to be a British guy there whose contribution,following the tradition of Hollywood war movies, has been pretty much cheerfully ignored.
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Source: guardian.co.uk