Unstoppable

Plot synopsis:
While moving a train pulled by AWVR AC4400CW's #777 and #767 at the Veteran Allegheny and West Virginia Railroad (AWVR) trainyard in the fictional city of Fuller, Pennsylvania, the two hostlers, Dewey and Gilleece, take ill-advised shortcuts and accidentally allow the engine to leave the train-yard on its own power without the air brakes engaged. Initially believing the train to be a "coaster", yardmaster Connie Hooper orders Dewey, Gilleece, and chief welder Ned Oldham to drive and catch up the train to stop it. When Oldham finds that the train has already passed where it was supposed to be, they realize that the train is running on full power and now poses a dangerous threat. Dewey and Gilleece manage to catch up to 777 using a high railing truck but fail to board the train in time. Hooper alerts Oscar Galvin, director of operations for AWVR, and also instructs the local and state police and sheriffs to secure all the grade crossings to prevent injury. Visiting Federal Railroad Administration safety inspector Scott Werner warns that 8 cars being pulled by 777 contain highly toxic, and highly flammable molten phenol which would be a major disaster if the train should crash or derail in a populated area. Triple 7 is also pulling around 5000 gallons of diesel fuel which also poses a serious threat. News of the runaway train soon becomes a media event.
However, Hooper suggests they purposely derail the train, but Galvin disagrees and believes they can safely stop the train by lashing it behind two slower-moving diesel engines helmed by veteran engineer Judd Stewart, slowing it down long enough for AWVR employee and former U.S. Marine Ryan Scott to descend via helicopter to 777's cab and stop the train manually. Though the lashing initially works, a sudden hard bump knocked Scott out and derailed the two diesel engines, causing them to explode, which ultimately kills Stewart in the process. They realize that 777, traveling at its current speed, will certainly derail on "Devil's Curve", a tight, elevated portion of track in the middle of the city of Stanton and would supposedly crash into a large fuel depot near the curve on the eastern side of the state. Plans are made to purposely derail the train outside the town of Arklow using a portable derailer.
Meanwhile, retiring AWVR engineer Frank Barnes and conductor Will Colson, a new hire looking to turn his life around after an incident with his now estranged wife, are pulling several cars with SD40-2 #1206 from Stanton. Though originally aware of 777 coasting away from the Fuller train yard, they are ordered at the last minute to pull into a Repair-In-Place track, making it just in time as 777 races by and clipping the last few cars they are pulling. Barnes observes that the last car on 777 has an open knuckle, which means that if they could catch up to the engine, they could couple their engine to 777 and use their own brakes to slow the train before it reaches Stanton. As Colson unhitches their cars to give them the best chance of catching up, Barnes reports his plan to Hooper and Galvin and warns them that the derailing idea will not work given 777's momentum, but Galvin threatens to fire Barnes if he continues. Given that AWVR has already given him a forced early retirement notice, Barnes ignores Galvin and sets 1206 on course to catch up with 777. As 777 passes Arklow, police attempt to shoot the fuel shutoff switch on the engine, but fail to hit it. As Barnes predicts, the train barrels through the derailers without slowing down or derailing. Hooper and Werner fully support Barnes' plan and take over control of the situation from Galvin.
Barnes and Colson catch up to 777 and attempt to engage the coupling. Their attempts to connect with 777 cause the grain car seal to break and leak grain at a blinding rate. Colson notices the locking pin on the coupler is not engaged. He attempts to kick it in but the couple again impacts 1206 and Colson gets his right foot crushed in the process. However, he is able to hold on enough to fully engage the locking pin. Barnes works his way across 777 to its cab, manually engaging the brakes on the freight cars along the way, while Colson engages 1206's dynamic brakes, which initially slow down 777, but would prove to be no match for 777's speed. They are able to reduce the speed slow enough to clear the Stanton Curve without derailing by using the independent brake, but 777 remains out of control and threatens to crash into the Stanton train yard. Despite attempting to reach the locomotive by jumping on the cars, Barnes finds his path blocked to 777's cab, but Oldham arrives in his truck with a police convoy and drives on a parallel road to the tracks. Colson jumps to Oldham's truck, and Oldham drives him up to the front of 777 allowing Colson to get into the cab and engage the brakes. 777 is safely stopped before it reaches the end of the line.
Barnes, Colson, and Oldham are heralded as heroes, with Barnes retiring (with full benefits) and Colson reuniting with his wife and child. Hooper is promoted to Galvin's former position for her leadership, Ryan Scott recovered from his injuries and Dewey goes to work into the fast food industry, indicating he was fired.

Tags: psychedelic, suspenseful, murder, violence, flashback

Review:
Wesley Snipes fans expecting a fightfest will probably be disappointed with "Unstoppable" / "Nine Lives", since the martial arts quotient is very limited.
But those who prefer their action films to be driven by their stories and have a touch of originality in them will probably like this more.
The originality comes mostly in the form of the hallucinogenic effects of the drug that Snipes gets injected with, and the ways director David Carson merges illusions with reality.
Snipes is believably haunted by his war memories, just as he is believably disoriented by the drug; an action star like, say, Steven Seagal, would hardly be able to handle this role.
I like almost all Snipes' action movies.
i loved this movie, i thought it was really cool, a little different then the average action film, deeper at times and good plot.
"Unstoppable" is another assembly-line action movie from Snipes.
The deranged military and former CIA agent Dean Cage (Wesley Snipes) is in a rehab program, trying to forget the traumatic loss of his best friend Scott in Bosnia.
When he dates with his girl-friend and Scott's sister, Detective Amy knight (Jacqueline Obradors), in a dinning restaurant, he is mistakenly taken as being the CIA agent that is investigating the robbery of the military experiment EX by a man called Sullivan (Stuart Wilson).
Amy has six hours to find the also stolen antidote and save Dean's life."Unstoppable" is a movie with an absurd and awful screenplay.
"Unstoppable" is an underwhelming action/drama with Snipes as a retired Special Forces badass who is unwittingly injected with a powerful hallucinogen which will result in his death unless he and his detective girlfriend (Obradors) can get their hands on the antidote before the end of the flick.
A very ordinary B-flick with a messy plot, this film spends its time with Snipes hallucinating when it's convenient and not when it's not while the rest of the cast (CIA, cops, bad guys) goes through the motions with the kind of enthusiasm you expect from a crew who just wants to get paid and go home.
Messy, rote, uninspired, and a big step down for Snipes who hasn't exactly been at the top of the A-list these day, "Unstoppable" is not recommendable even for action junkies.
The big-set effects seem to have been saved for the final scenes, but nevertheless a chilling premise.This is another freaky tale of mind manipulation weapons development and attempts at proliferation, thereof.Don't go out of your way, but if you do, it's certainly a decent fix for any action movie buff.Die-hard Wesley Snipes fans won't want to miss this one, however.
Somewhere near the beginning of the movie, Snipes who plays Dean Cage, U.S. Army black ops soldier serial # 190405243, reminds us that he is one of the most dangerous international-level fighters both on and off camera.
Snipes makes an average action movie a much better one, but Obradors makes it somewhat difficult to watch.
Overall, this is an exciting movie with good actors, decent plot and suitable turns.
Good Wesley Snipes Movie.
Good Wesley Snipes Movie.
I can not understand why this movie is rated so low on this web site the rating is 4.9 and this movie is not a 4.9 it is at least a 6 and a half out of 10.Wesley Snipes who is a kick ass action actor does a good job at acting and kicking ass in this movie.If u liked Wesley Snipes in this movie u should watch him in some of his other great action movies like Blade II, his first movie Wildcats,Passenger 57,Money train or White Men Can't Jump.Over all do not believe this movies bad rating and all of the bad comments about this movie because this movie is way better then people say it is.And my rating is 6 and a half out of 10..
"Blade: Trinity" Wesley Snipes' last, horrible movie, suggested a classic "Steven Segal" case.
But if you want a good, surprisingly fresh (very violent) action film, "Unstoppable" just might be the ticket.
All I wanted was a decent Action flick and I was disappointed once again by Snipes's choices in film ( the last flick he was in was the DTV "The Marksman" ).
Arnold needed to don his best leathers and cyborg strut to make money and Wesley has only smelt box office sweetness in his action man status with the Blade series.
Snipes was at one point the black mans action hero, a seminal cult symbol amongst black cinema goers and good too.
This is proved really by the fact that outside of the Blade series Wesley has not had exceptional box office receipts in his action vehicles, a mixture of mainly an African-American audience and the fact that the films were inferior to the ones Sly and Arnold were doing.I'm a fan of Snipes, he's a great actor given the right roles and I truly believe he cursed his career all those years ago by saying yes to doing Passenger 57.
Action films tend to waste him and since then the good roles have somewhat dried up compared to his golden period in his Spike Lee collaborations, in White Men Can't Jump, New Jack City and King Of New York.
Not only is Unstoppable a bad action movie but it represents a real decline in financial backing and faith in Snipes ability to pull in an audience on his own.
You sit and watch and feel this shouldn't happen to Snipes, who is going through the motions.The plot has more holes than the holiest Swiss-cheese on earth and involves government conspiracies and comes across in some respects as a low grade Bourne movie (Snipes plays a guy hunted down by spooks while his mind is fried to s**t) it even has a supporting role in it for Adewale Agbaje who was in Bourne Identity.
They don't realize they have the wrong man and it is left to Snipes girlfriend (Jacqueline Obradors) to work out what is going on and help her bloke.So the plot is all over the place but this is an action movie, does it have enough well choreographed carnage to save it?
Before I start about this movie, I know many of you would like to direct your blame at Wesley, maybe not for just this movie but a lot of turkeys he's been making recently (Zig Zag, 7 seconds, The Marksman, Liberty stands still).
There are a few good fight scenes, like the scene in the Diner when Dean Cage (Snipes's character) beats down his attacker, and the chase to hunt him down is mildly enjoyable hence the generous maybe biased 5 out of ten I gave it.
If you haven't enjoyed a decent performance from our dear friend Wesley since Jungle Fever or even Rising Sun, then don't expect it here, in fact who knows if we'll ever see another classic Wesley Snipes movie, now that he seems to make low budget straight to video fodder........watch only if it's on TV and nothing better is on.
And the people who directed/wrote/starred and had basically anything to do with it should never be allowed near a movie set again!I wouldn't recommend to any to pay decent money for this film, even on DVD.
The lead detective, Amy Knight (Jacqueline Obradors), was so over the top with her badassedness that it was comical and it looked like even Wesley mailed it in.Wesley Snipes as an ex-special ops guy is believable.
There were two henchman that actually ran around the whole movie in trench coats like 1930's G-Men. Good grief..
Former Special Ops agent Dean Cage (Wesley Snipes) is mistaking for another agent.
This had to be the worst Wesley Snipes flick of all time.
I hope Snipes can start making movies that actually hits the theaters, but for now, he's a straight to DVD actor.
Wesley Snipes stars as Dean Gage, an ex soldier who has emotional baggage, however when he is injected with a truth serum, Gage finds himself vulnerable and the bad guys on his trail, but who can he trust?
I caught Unstoppable on USA a couple of months ago and it is easily one of the worst movies i've seen from Wesley Snipes.
The action sequences are filmed with little interest and the movie just lacks an originality or life to make this for anyone but Wesley Snipes enthusiasts.1/2* out of 4-(Awful).
Wesley Snipes play the part of an ex-soldier that is going to marry his girlfriend, but, in a bar, he is confused with another person and a group of traitors to CIA inject him a powerful drug that mixes reality and memory.
Neither the actors nor the plot are very good so the film is quite bad.
Ideal for TVfilm (it was originally thought as one), for seeing and forgot, but a little enjoyable if you like action films.
Not Wesley's best but a decent action film..
I honestly liked this film even though it was not the best.Wesley plays Dean Cage, a black ops soldier who encounters other CIA officials
even though it wasn't the greatest.The movie from what I remember had some decent action scenes,
you know, It's your standard direct to DVD action fair but I liked it.Overall a decent little action film, It's one of those movies you
Wesley Snipes is a deranged former army personnel and CIA agent in rehab who suffered the loss of his best friend in a mission in Bosnia.
Snipes becomes mixed up in a plot dealing with an experimental truth serum and is abducted and injected by the serum which gives him flashbacks to his Bosnian mission and cannot distinguish from reality while his girlfriend needs to find the antidote.The film has a moderate budget and made for a cinema release but is rather absurd and flawed even for an action thriller.
Snipes has charisma but looks like a man whose future is heading for straight to DVD films..
Unstoppable is one of those movies that people immediately attack, calling it Wesley Snipes descent into video land and such.
And the best part was that when he curiously tapped the window, the sound guy gets such a loud roar in his headphones that he just about falls out of the car.Wesley Snipes turns in a satisfactory performance, except for any scene where he thinks he's back in Bosnia and his friend is being tortured in front of him.
Throughout the movie there are some good scenes put together where Cage slips in and out of reality, thinking that the guys trying to interrogate him in the present time are his captors from Bosnia.
With the exception of the scene where his girlfriend disappears in front of his eyes in the shower (I disappeared people on screen better than that when I was making short films at Fresno City College), a lot of these are actually done well.Outside of the mistaken identity, the plot revolves around a top-secret drug that makes people completely susceptible to suggestion and also causes total synaptic melt-down within 6-8 hours of injection.
Cage was injected in the diner early in the movie, and spends the rest of the movie reeling from the effects of it, while his girlfriend Amy, a highly overacting Jacqueline Obradors, tries to figure out what happened and then get the antidote.
Once the bad guy gets injected, he joins in the search, frantically grabbing handfuls of capsules looking for the right one, having forgotten that he has 6-8 hours before he really has to worry, as well as the fact that there is a huge case full of thousands and thousands of doses of the antidote sitting right there in his truck.Another thing that this movie really has going against it is that the action scenes are just ludicrous.
Unstoppable is set in Baltimore where ex secret service CIA agent Dean Cage (Wesley Snipes) is trying to adjust to normal civilian life after his best mate Scott (Cristian Solimeno) was killed in action in Bosnia.
Dean manages to escape from Sullivan & his men & Amy uses her police contacts to discover the truth & try to help Dean who is now a wanted man as he slowly dies from the drug, Dean's only hope is to face Sullivan again & get the antidote...Also known as Nine Lives in Europe this Aruba American co-production was directed by David Crason & is yet another Millennium Films action flick featuring some has been Hollywood action star, in this case it's Snipes who really hasn't made a decent film in years if we are honest & while Unstoppable isn't necessarily unwatchable it's hardly any sort of masterpiece.
To be fair to Unstoppable there's the potential for a decent little action thriller here, the idea that someone is injected with some drug that will kill him in a few hours & thus has to find an antidote is fine as the pace never lets up & the stakes are high but Unstoppable is no Crank (2006) & it has some major problems that prevent me from being able to recommend it.
As a cheap rental or if you catch it on telly for free then Unstoppable is alright but it suffers from basic plot holes & a story that if you think about it for any length of time is just laughable, for instance there's this powerful yet fatal drug that is developed by the US Government & the whole lot is stolen by one guy as well as the antidote.
No more, no less.The action scenes in Unstoppable are also better than the usual direct to video fare, the fights are good, the shoot-outs are decent & there's even a cool scene involving a huge truck swerving off a bride & exploding at the bottom.
The film switches between reality & Snipes hallucination, for instance when a bad guy says he is on fire Snipes actually thinks he is & a lot more could have been done with the premise other than have Snipes flashback to his time in Bosnia.Filmed in Bulgaria although set in Baltimore, the production values are decent enough & it's well made.
The acting is alright, Snipes looks bored while Obradors played a cop in seventy five episodes of NYPD Blue.Unstoppable is a pretty decent little action thriller, certainly by direct to video fare standards Unstoppable is alright but at the same time it's nothing that memorable or amazing.
Wesley spends most of the movie looking like he's drugged and regretting something - like signing up for this flick.
This is one of Wesley's worst movies in my opinion, that's actually rather dull, with not much action, and an ordinary story.
This is one of Wesley's worst movies in my opinion, that's actually rather dull, with not much action, and an ordinary story.
All the characters are so,so and the performance are not that good either,however Wesley Snipes is simply amazing in this!
Granted this isn't one of Wesley's greatest performances but he was amazing enough to at least keep it bearable, and I thought this was cheaply made and pretty poorly written as well, plus Jacqueline Obradors surprised me by giving an intense performance and created a little spark in the film,although it wasn't enough.
Having said that there isn't anything else positive I can say about this film as it's just too below average, and why Wesley accepted this horrid script is beyond me, plus there are no good fight scenes to be found other then a short one at a diner.
This is one of Wesley's worst movies in my opinion, that's actually rather dull, with not much action, and an ordinary story, and I say pass.
Wesley Snipes is amazing as always and is amazing here (well for this type of film anyway), he was very likable,as always tough as nails, however what really ticked me off is why he decided to pick a crappy script like this, still he went with it, and gave it his all, and I truly appreciated that, he is the one reason that made this bearable.
He had wanted to marry her long before but the tragedy that happened with her brother prevented him from going forward.She stuck with him through all his emotional problems as well as through the incident in this movie.I never cared for her character in NYPD Blue but I really liked her here.I was rooting for Wesley Snipe's character and her to have a chance at a life together..
What is Snipes doing in a film like this?.
I'm not sure if it's connected to his tax problems but at some point along the line, Wesley Snipes decided he didn't care about being a serious actor or even a major movie star.
I suppose it was easy money for relatively little effort, but somebody with that ambition would never have had the career Snipes used to have.This is the story of Dean Cage (Wesley Snipes), a former military operative of the CIA who winds up injected with a powerful hallucinogenic drug in a case of mistaken identity.
Sullivan thinks Dean is the CIA guy out to stop him and injects him with the drug to interrogate him.
With Dean tormented by a secret involving a mission where Amy's brother got killed and the fact that the drug will kill him in 6 hours if he doesn't get the antidote, it's a race to see if the good, the bad or the in between will be the ones left standing at the end.Unstoppable is practically at the level of "See Spot Run" in its simple plotting, characterization and dialog.
Some gratuitous nudity could have been inserted in the movie a lot easier than additional action scenes, but both would have been appreciated.This isn't a terrible film.
You'd just think Wesley Snipes would be doing a far better movie than this.