Night Train

It's unreal. I don't understand, barring a deliberate bot attack, the ratings given to this movie don't make any sense. Unless the unexpected success of the previous film by this same writer/director team provoked revengeful jealousy. Going from honorable ratings, given by the first spectators in the movie theaters, to only ratings of 1 in one day, would be a joke if it weren't so sad. This film is good, maybe not what this highly touted second poster announces (why?), but there is an atmosphere, multidimensional characters, a duo of amazing actresses, action necessary for the script but not omnipresent and above all beautiful intimate scenes between characters. Shout out to Daniele C Ryan and Joe Lando for their father/daughter scenes. The questionable lynching of this film is not deserved. Don't expect a movie of big cylinders, explosions and brainless little peeps, it's much more than that. Give it a chance.

Now, the movie "Night Train" is listed as an action thriller. I have to say that I found it to be neither of those two things. The movie was, for a lack of better words, just downright boring.

The storyline in "Night Train", as written by CJ Walley, was a complete and utter swing and a miss in terms of entertaining me. The narrative in the movie was so insanely slow paced that you could leave the movie running whilst you had to do house chores, then come back and still be up to speed. And the fact that the character gallery had about as much appeal as a carton of spoiled milk, just didn't exactly help to sell the movie.

The acting performances in "Night Train" were stale. Nothing to get the movie up in speed here either. Of the entire cast, then I was only familiar with Abraham Benrubi and Reggie Austin.

If you enjoy a good action thriller, just like I do, then do yourself a favor and don't waste 95 minutes on watching "Night Train". Nay, you just might want to skip out on punching the ticket for this particular train and just let it roll past the train station in the snail pace tempo that it was going forward in.

My rating of "Night Train", from director Shane Stanley, lands on a generous two out of ten stars.

You see the assault rifle the girl is holding on the poster? She never holds a gun, ever. There is no action. None. I don't think there's even a single gun shot. Even the poster looks like it was generated by an AI.

There's a drag race in the beginning with an opening montage that feels like a Fast and Furious knock off. Then there's a dull off road desert car chase at the end that looks like they were going no more than 15 miles an hour. That's all the action you'll ever get.

There are two plots going on. The A plot has the main character running drugs in her "legendary souped-up pickup truck" (someone actually wrote those words). The B plot is an FBI woman trying to stop the drug flow. The A plot doesn't even happen until 1/3 into the movie. And the two plots don't even intersect until 2/3 into the movie.

The B plot with the FBI woman is so unbelievably bizarre. Her character is supposed to be this tragic alcoholic and the actress actually seems like she's drunk. She must because she knows how absolutely crap this movie is. Her plot painfully cringe to watch.

And let's not forget the main character. An attractive young blonde that's "just one of the boys". Take a shot for every time they bring up how she's a girl.

This is basically a fetish movie for the director. He seems to have a thing for casting blondes in "action movies". If that's your thing, cool, but at least bring the action. The movie does have that "so bad it's good" quality sometimes but it's not worth it.

I had a hard time following at first. The two protagonists are both women with long blonde hair and the same build. It took me half an hour to figure out there were two different women in the movie. These are not actors I was familiar with. The storyline was okay, but there wasn't as much action as there could have been. It also seems like they could have developed the characters a little bit more. It was hard to root for someone doing something illegal, but I also didn't find the agent terribly likable or easy to sympathize with. The plot was okay, but the execution was lacking. I think the movie was missing some depth.

To be honest I only gave this movie a chance because I taught the main actress (Danielle C. Ryan) was gorgeous, and I was right. The movie starts with a story all over the place and you have no idea who is who, but after a slow and in my opinion, a bad start, they picked up a pace and I'm glad I didn't quit after 30 minutes. Two leading actresses gave very solid performances, also some of the supporting cast also did a reasonable job, which was a bit of a surprise because of the terrible rating this movie has. There are also some very well written dialogues between characters, also another surprise that a B rated movie gets emotional and deeply thought on few occasions. If you expect something spectacular and blockbuster action and effects, well this is not for you, if you lower your expectations and have some free time to spend Night Train isn't that terrible.