"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1" is clearly the box office winner for the two weekends it has been showing, but is it the best new release out there?
Rotten Tomatoes reviewers say no. There, both the Disney animation, "Tangled," in its first weekend, and the action-suspense "Unstoppable" are rated higher. Hallows came in at 78 percent red (hence, fresh, as opposed to rotten green), which is pretty doggone good. But the other flicks came in at 87 and 84 percent, respectively.
Here is my very short review of Hallows: booooooooooorrrriiiiinnnngggg. This movie bored me to tears. As my daughter, a devoted Potter fan, said, the subtitle of Hallows should have been, "Harry Potter goes camping. And camping. And camping. Then he goes camping some more." That's the problem with making a movie for which there must be a sequel; the seventh book is, after all, showing over two movies. The producers said they split the book in twain for theater because of its length. Well, too bad they don't have wizard powers like Potter, or they'd have known to cut the camping (90 percent of it, anyway) and then one movie would have done the job.
I give Deathly Hallows, Part One, four of 10 elder wands.
Unstoppable, OTOH, has no pretensions as Hallows does. Unstoppable is a movie about two guys trying to stop a runaway train from destroying Stanton, Pa. That's it. There's no cosmic wisdom, no fate of all humanity hanging in the balance (though presumably there is the fate of some thousands of Stantonites). Denzel Washington plays Frank Barnes, a prematurely-retired engineer with 18 days left on the job. Chris Pine plays Will Colson, a newbie right out of train company basic training. The screenplay makes a desultory attempt to get a buddy movie playoff between the two, but fortunately, it's abandoned early.
There's very little CGI in the scenes, filmed mostly with real trains and elsewhere with large-scale models. It works, mate. The movie is an ode to working stiffs with a little bit of economic populism thrown in - the company's CEO, advised on the golf course that the train's toxic tanker cars could kill thousands of people asks what would happen to the company's stock price if that occurred. But fortunately, such flirtations are rare and inconsequential.
Instead, just a rollicking yarn of two everymen and a woman yard manager trying to figure out how to stop a half-million pounds of certain mayhem. They're making it up as they go along.
Here's the trailer:
And here is Emory University physics Prof. Sidney Perkowitz explaining the physics behind the movie, especially concerning the train's destructive potential.
I give Unstoppable nine of 10 wrecked locomotives.
So there ya go.
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