When heroes are beaten by the script

The 15:17 to Paris 15 cert, 94 min

★★★★★ Dir Clint Eastwood Starring Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, Jenna Fischer, Judy Greer

Clint Eastwood’s last two films, American Sniper and Sully, delved into ideas of modernday heroism with a troubled complexity that was easily – sometimes even wilfully – overlooked. Both had haunted undersides, practically functioning as Rorschach tests for how viewers might be willing to conceive of American exceptionalism.

The 15:17 to Paris is ready to be bracketed with them as the third part of an unofficial trilogy, concerning as it does the impromptu heroics of three young Americans on board a Thalys-bound train from Amsterdam in August 2015. A Moroccan gunman opened fire in their carriage, and these three men, along with other passengers, managed to subdue and disarm him without anyone being killed.

Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos received many decorations, including the French Légion d’honneur, for the lives they undoubtedly saved, and now they’re granted a kind of victory lap not only in having their story put before the cameras, but even – here’s the curious twist – in filling the main roles by playing themselves.

The film makes no attempt to pretend these are dudes who can act and sometimes it has the feel of a borderline-documentary reconstruction. But the trouble is the feeble drama shape Eastwood has given the whole thing: it’s a narrative of almost nothing interesting happening until the moment of crisis in the very last reel. It’s weird to be put in the position of wanting the terrorist attack to hurry up and happen, but there’s little else to keep us occupied.

Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer play religious moms whose first scene is a badly written beef with a teacher. Thomas Lennon is the school principal. And the child performances Eastwood gets are so off-key, they have the weird effect of making the real-life Stone, Sadler and Skarlatos look like absolute pros, comparatively speaking.

It’s workaday hagiography about havea-go heroes, respectful of their lives and efforts, but artistically hardly bothering. For all that they lack acting ability – and playing yourself is the toughest of performance tasks, not the easiest – there’s no way this trio should be held culpable for how banal the film winds up feeling. They pulled off a life-and-death struggle with their assailant, one Ayoub El-khazzani, but it’s a losing battle against this script.