Eastwood’s latest is missing in action
Veteran director’s take on how three Americans stopped a terrorist is like sitting through vacation photos
A better title for director Clint Eastwood’s 36th feature might be 15 Seconds of Terror. That’s about how long the attack on a Paris-bound train seems to last. The remaining 93½ minutes of the film is mostly taken up with an extended European holiday by its stars. It’s like The Trip without the celebrity impressions.
Eastwood has done a quick turnaround on this true-life story: It was less than three years ago when an armed terrorist was taken down by U.S. travellers Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler. In an unusual bit of casting, the men play themselves in the film. This rarely happens — Jackie Robinson did it in 1950, and U.S. soldier Audie Murphy did it in the 1955 war movie To Hell and Back — but it works well enough here, thanks to the boys’ aw-shucks naturalism.
The real problem is the screenplay, adapted by Dorothy Blyskal from the heroes’ memoir. Much of the film is taken up with a European journey in which they sightsee the touristy bits of Venice, Amsterdam and Berlin, essentially repeating their summer vacation with better cinematography.
They hang out with a couple of women who then vanish from the film. Hey, this isn’t Before Sunrise. Stone sometimes speaks darkly of having a feeling that he’s being pushed toward some great event, while in Germany a tour guide corrects their belief that Hitler killed himself in the face of advancing U.S. troops: “You Americans can’t take credit every time evil is defeated.” Ha ha.
Surprisingly, 15:17 to Paris works best when it rewinds to the early 2000s to show how the three amigos first met in elementary school, bonding over a shared love of butting heads with authority figures. Winsome kids play their younger selves, and their school is populated with a boy’s idea of dorky teachers — Thomas Lennon, Tony Hale, Irene White, P.J. Byrne — while their moms are the kind you wish your friends had back in the day; Jenna Fischer and Judy Greer. It felt like a lost season of Stranger Things was about to break out.
But in spite of these idyllic childhood reveries, the film leaves too many questions unanswered. Stone’s military career is particularly confusing — at one point I thought he was thrown out of basic training for bad sewing — while Skarlatos’s is unexplored: one moment he’s not in the film; next he’s serving in Afghanistan; and then he joins his buddies in Europe.
Sadler wasn’t even in the forces. You could learn more about the trio of heroes from their Wikipedia pages, which helpfully skip the bit where they all frolic in the Trevi Fountain and then go out for gelato. Ever sat through someone else’s vacation photos? That’s this.
The director has been revisiting stories of U.S. bravery and military prowess every couple of years, with mixed results. The 2006 diptych Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima was near perfect, while the more recent American Sniper faced charges of simplifying a complex situation, and more generally of jingoism. And I enjoyed Sully despite the fact that the villains were Canadian geese.
And 15:17 to Paris overly simplifies the attack and its aftermath. The terrorist (Ray Corasani) snarls and wears sneakers, but there’s little more to him. Similarly, the train passengers are a background blur — there’s an old guy, a guy who gets shot in the back, and a woman with a dog, this being France.
Eastwood delivers a technically excellent product — even pushing 88, the guy isn’t slowing down — but he needs more nuance in this one. The characters shift from tourism to heroism in a heartbeat, but the movie gives equal weight to both facets of their lives, when it needs to focus on the heroism.