Final Speed - Stoppt den Todeszug!

This action packed movie is really suspenseful and does a good job of keeping you on the edge of your seats. I hope that this one comes out on video, I really want to watch it again. This is a great film for someone who likes suspense, action. There is the perfect amount of thrill for those interested in mechanics.

And they're ALL on board Americana Rail's crack Grand Royale: the Disposable Engineer, the Cute Little Kid, the Arrogant Politician, the Sick Passenger (who needs immediate help), the New Stepmom (who just wants to fit in), the Ex-Quarterback-who-lost-the-Big-Game (but who gets a new chance to save the day), and... the Unlikely Hero! What I mean is, they've already parodied this sort of film in the "Airplane" series and "The Big Bus". Still, this could have been done very well; but there are so many distracting factual errors that we keep getting thrown off....the track. Railroad disaster dramas are hard to pull off, anyway; trains go, or they don't. So they made this one hard to stop, with so many goofy reasons for it that railroaders will be rolling in laughter. (That schtick was tried in 1973's "Runaway", with the same results.) It's not all bad; there is some great British Columbia rail photography to be seen, and the interior scenes are done well. But when the plot says the Grand Royale is doing over 80, we can see it's obviously more like 25 at best, even with the tricky camera angles that are used. Stuff like that is just carelessness. A pity; I wanted to like this movie.

You wonder how stupid a film has to get before you call it a spoof. You could easily have made this film twice as good by employing Leslie Nielsen to open the door to the cockpit and say "Good luck, we're all counting on you".

For me the suspense in these films is made by the realism. Intelligent people doing the sensible things that just don't go right, or the sensibly designed equipment is just not up to the job.

Here we have stupid people doing idiotic things, the laws of physics are completely ignored. Ropes pass through overhead cables. And quite frankly I think I designed a safer locomotive when I was 12. A bird with precise bowel movements could have shorted out this train.

In fact I recommend you watch it backwards, that way you can go from the obvious outcomes to the hilarious and unpredictable reasons that got them into that outcome.

I won't repeat the vast list of technical errors and impossibilities that the previous commentators made, I think we all spotted them for ourselves. My comment is in a different direction.

I frequently have issues with commentators who concentrate on technical errors in movies. I think that often they have missed the point. In this movie, however, such commentary is entirely relevant. Here, the entire movie is about (correction, is SUPPOSED to be about) the "technics" of a modern computerised train gone wrong. Thus, in my opinion, in a movie like this, the movie makers have an obligation (to their own credibility, if nothing else) to get the technical details right, because in theory, that's what their movie is trying to show! If they don't, they suffer the consequences: as so many of the other commentators said, the movie becomes a spoof of itself.

Also, and I'm a bit surprised that no-one else has picked up this point, I would have thought that by 1999 we would have gotten past the cliche of "infallible computer fails". Or was this some kind of twisted pre-Y2K hype?

Every trite cliche, every sub-plot imaginable, combine to make this the most awful piece of trash I have ever seen. From stepmother/step son conflict to failed athlete to obnoxious Washington politico(is there any other) a hodge-podge of garbage.