Real heroes can’t rescue phoney drama
Clint Eastwood’s choice to cast first-time actors was a mistake
When Clint Eastwood was filming a tender family scene in American Sniper a few years back and a real baby failed to materialize, he opted to use a demonstrably fake plastic one instead.
“Gimme the doll, kid!” Clint reportedly growled to an aide.
The same Git-R-Done spirit and reckless plasticity infuse terror train chronicle The 15:17 to Paris, Eastwood’s latest exercise in high-speed filmmaking and Uncle Sam jingoism.
Clint went from talking last May at Cannes about his plans to film this heroic true-life story to having finished work ready for the masses this very weekend.
His hurry-up method included dispensing with the apparently tedious chore of having actors play the heroes: Air Force medic Spencer Stone, National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos and college student Anthony Sadler.
Instead Clint cast Stone, Skarlatos and Sadler as themselves, re-enacting the heart-stopping moments of Aug. 21, 2015, when they intervened to stop a heavily armed terrorist aboard a high-speed Thalys train bound for Paris.
A bold move, but none of the three had previously acted — and they still can’t. I wouldn’t blink if you’d told me the plastic baby from American Sniper had grown up to portray the cherubic Stone, who is a man I’d like to have beside me on any rail or air journey, as long as I didn’t have to watch him on a screen.
By default Stone demonstrates the wisdom, now forgotten, of Eastwood hiring Tom Hanks to play heroic pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger for the film Sully, rather than Sullenberger himself.
The railway heroes get zero assistance from rookie screenwriter Dorothy Blyskal, who seems to think she’s been hired as a lighthouse keeper rather than a storyteller. Everything is signposted for the main event, which is teased throughout the film in a vain attempt to build suspense.
Stone turns prophet as he muses that “life is just pushing us toward something.”
An occurrence that took mere minutes in real life is stretched out to feature length as Blyskal and Eastwood lard in back story. It returns to childhood days when Stone, Skarlatos and Sadler were chumming around as kids in hometown Sacramento, causing holy hell together at their Christian school. Real actors Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer play two of their exhausted moms; comedian Thomas Lennon plays the overly strict school principal; and three young actors whom we’ll mercifully leave unnamed play the heroes-tobe.
The summer holiday that brings Stone, Skarlatos and Sadler to Europe and that fateful Amsterdam-toParis rail journey is presented in mind-numbing detail, as the three kill screen minutes by getting drunk, chatting up girls, taking selfies and making tourist stops. (The latter includes a visit to the scene of Hitler’s bunker in Berlin, where the tour guide starts singing the farcical “Springtime For Hitler” from Mel Brooks’ The Producers.)
When the time comes for the actual heroism to occur, Eastwood bizarrely rushes through it. He barely shows us Ayoub El Khazzani (Ray Corasani), the Moroccan-born terrorist who boarded the train with an arsenal that included an AK-47 assault rifle and 300 rounds of ammunition.
Unlike the book adapted for the screenplay, co-authored by the heroes with journalist Jeffrey E. Stern, no insights are offered about the terrorist’s past or his motivations for wanting to kill or maim the 500 people aboard the train.
There’s also nothing much about passenger Mark Moogalian, who also plays himself in the film and who would have died after being shot in the neck, had not Stone staunched the wound. Ditto for British businessman Chris Norman, who helped subdue El Khazzani.
It’s really all about the three American heroes, Stone in particular. And while it’s undeniably fascinating to watch these three guys re-enact a moment of high drama, the tension is drained away by the knowledge that this time, they really are just going through the motions.
It’s like the scenes in Eastwood’s earlier film Flags of Our Fathers, where the heroes of Iwo Jima are obliged to tour America on a patriotic fundraising effort, where night after night they monotonously reenact the unfurling of Old Glory, as seen in the legendary news photo of the island victory.
With The 15:17 to Paris, Eastwood once again tells an American story with a narrow-minded efficiency that somehow makes reality seem fake.