Rating: C
Dir: Ryan Francis
Star: Nicky Whelan, Scout Taylor-Compton, Louis Mandylor, Oliver Masucci
This is a dumb and low-budget effort, to be sure. It just about passes muster though, once it gets going, selling the stupidity of its own premise. Okay: perhaps closer: concealing it beneath a welter of gratuitous violence. It does deliver the worst fate for an unwanted guitar player (top) since National Lampoon’s Animal House. This takes place in a future where digital brain chips are the order of the day, an implanted interface with the Internet. We open with a commercial for the product in question, made by the Lumerex corporation. Who also are a network rail provider, because of course they are. They ship convicts about on their trains too. Sure. Why not?
Naturally, things go wrong, courtesy of a disgruntled employee, Loklin (Mandylor). He is able to hack the brain chips, in effect turning users into puppets. Conveniently, the convicts are all chipped, and he sells the rights to control them for ten million dollars on the dark web. You can run amok, slaughtering innocent passengers, as the train hurtles, out of control, towards doom in Washington. Meanwhile, the corporation seeks to cover up the event and bury the evidence. However, the other occupants of the train are less helpless than presumed. They include Interpol officer Gray (Masucci), and a group of “cheerleaders” (Whelan and Scout-Compton). Quotes used advisedly, since they seem nearer to menopause than high school, and their skills are not limited to the waving of pom-poms.
It’s easy to think of ways this could be improved. There’s no need, for example, to see Loklin’s customers, wearing VR headsets and looking vexed as their hardened criminals get taken down by the spirit squad. All that stuff is superfluous and adds precisely zero entertainment. It also takes too long to get going, and is painfully obvious that the budget only extended to a single train carriage, dressed in slightly different ways. Windows? They are vastly overrated. Because then you’d need to green screen in scenery, instead of relying on unconvincing footage of a CGI train going through CGI countryside. At least it’s not the Asylum knock-off of Bullet Train I suspected. [That actually exists, and is called Bullet Train Down]
Though sadly, nor is it the Con Air knock-off I hoped for – albeit thirty years too late – from the first few minutes. It plays more like an adaptation of a video game you’ve never heard of. You can either play as the convicts, who have to fight their way through the train to reach the driver’s carriage and take control, or the passengers who have to stop them. This sentence delivers a more interesting and well thought-out plot than what is offered here, albeit a little “We have Snowpiercer at home.” I will admit to having been adequately entertained. Just do not press me on the precise definitions of either “adequately” or “entertained,” because you will get vague hand gestures and a diffident shrug.