Night Train Review (2009)

Night Train Review (2009)
Director: Brian King
Writer: Brian King
Starring: Leelee Sobieski, Danny Glover, Steve Zahn, Geoff Bell, Constantine Gregory
Release Date: July 7, 2009
Runtime: 91 minutes

Continuing the Leelee Sobieski rewatch series, we come to our first stinker for the talented actress. Night Train is at the bottom of the barrel. I said as much in the Top 5 hub piece, and I stand by every word of it, having forced myself to watch this again for this review. It’s a bad film. Not interestingly bad, not so-bad-it’s-fun bad. Just bad. Terrible even. The runtime makes it seem like it’ll at least be a quick one, but no, this is one of those films that seems much longer than it is.

The premise is fine on paper. Three strangers on a night train: a pre-med student (Sobieski), a burned-out conductor (Danny Glover), and a struggling salesman (Steve Zahn) find a mysterious box belonging to a weird passenger who dies on the train. They make the collective decision, with some reluctance by Glover, to keep it rather than report the body. The box appears to be full of extraordinary gems. What follows should be a tense, claustrophobic thriller about greed and paranoia eating away at three ordinary people in a confined space. That is a movie that could have possibly worked. Night Train is not that movie.

The characters make no logical sense from start to finish. The decisions they make are not the decisions of people under pressure or people overcome by greed, they are the decisions of people who exist only to serve whatever the script needs to happen next, regardless of whether it tracks with anything established about them previously. You will spend the runtime watching three reasonably talented actors be made to look foolish by a screenplay that has no real idea what it wants to be or where it wants to go. I’ve never asked myself “but why?” so many times in a movie. This film is filled with decisions made by characters that will leave you shaking your head in disbelief at how stupid literally every person on the train is.

Watch the trailer above, and you will have practically seen the entire film. That’s how ass it is.

Danny Glover is too good for this. He must’ve just needed a paycheck, because he half-assed this performance, and I don’t blame him. The garbage script doesn’t offer much to work with. Steve Zahn, who I have liked in quite a bit, is given nothing to do but react to increasingly absurd situations. He was good, if annoying, in his other outing with Leelee (J oy Ride), but here he’s the moron that sets the whole thing in motion.

And Leelee, who has been overall impressive throughout this rewatch series, is stranded in a role that asks very little of her beyond looking worried and making terrible choices. And somehow transforming into the coldest, most vicious person on the train. Completely unbelievable for her. Like she tried, but come on.

None of the stars can save what they have been handed here. Neither can the other people in this mess.

The ending doesn’t explain itself in any satisfying way. By the time it arrives, you have long since stopped caring what the box actually contains or what happens to anyone on that train. The film reaches for some kind of deeper meaning in its final moments and falls well short. It is the kind of ending that might have worked if the preceding ninety minutes had built toward it with any care or intelligence. They didn’t. From about the forty-five-minute mark on, you’re just left wondering how much longer this film is going to go on.

Night Train was a direct-to-video release, and if you can watch it, you’ll see why someone made the smart decision to skip the theater release. With this cast and this premise, there was no excuse for it to be this dull and this incoherent. Skip it. It is the one entry in the Leelee Sobieski rewatch series I would tell you to avoid entirely. She’s not even hot in this one.

Night Train gets a one out of five: BAD.