It will be surprising if there is a stranger mainstream film this year than Clint Eastwood's docudrama The 15:17 to Paris; it is bad in several ways, noble in a few, and almost always fascinating, albeit often uncomfortably. Similar to Eastwood's prior picture, the more conventional and satisfying Sully, its core is a headline-generating, minutes-long incident of peril and heroism: in this case, two American servicemen and their friend, a civilian, disrupting the plot of an armed Moroccan terrorist on a train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris (a British businessman also helped, but Eastwood shows no interest in his viewpoint or, to be honest, his existence, and it is almost confusing when he is featured in an epilogue utilizing archival footage of an Elysée Palace press conference). In an unusual gambit, the three Americans are played by themselves rather than movie stars; their performances are flat, undoubtedly not helped by Eastwood's legendary aversion to filming a scene more than once or twice, but also oddly charming. There is an interesting tension between their clear discomfort in front of the camera and their genuine chemistry and comfort with one another as childhood friends.

The wilder gambit, in fact, may be how Eastwood turns their fight on the train into a feature-length film. He does not, say, show the incident from various perspectives (the Americans, the other passengers, the radicalized gunman, law enforcement, etc.) in a bid for United 93-style verisimilitude. No, this is truly, plainly, unpretentiously presented as the three Americans' life story, so we follow them from junior high through to the fateful rail journey. The 15:17 to Paris is, I swear, inadvertently avant-garde in how openly tedious it is as it traces their decent, unspectacular lives: the schoolyard, bars, fast-food restaurants, the minutiae of life during basic training, surfing the Internet, the occasional nighttime prayer, etc. For around half an hour, it even becomes an earnest European travelogue, the big-screen equivalent of perusing a vacationing friend's social-media posts. The rather interminable pre-train scenes range from modestly diverting to modestly dull to scorched-earth awful (Eastwood has never directed scenes more tone deaf and extraneous than any featuring Jenna Fischer and Judy Greer as two of the protagonists' single mothers).

C

I know there will be a small sliver of auteur-minded Eastwood apologists in the world who are going to lose their minds for this film's almost transcendent inertness and consider it his masterpiece.

Its been released here since last weekend and I somehow find ways to avoid it. I want to see it in terms of "how bad it is"

Clint has gone full blown red state wack-job mode. But that’s not the worst of it. He can make that movie, and I might disagree with some of it, but as long as it’s interesting, try me. This isn’t interesting. There’s no movie here. It’s 86 minutes of unfocused nonsense. And the poor guys can’t act for shit. They’re heroes, but they can’t act. Ethan Hawks and Julie Delpy they ain’t. Which means 86 minutes feels like 172 minutes, especially during the European vacay. Stop taking so many fucking selfies! Someone mentioned it on Letterboxd that the dialog is Tommy Wiseau-sequel. That’s dead on. Remember how they got in trouble earlier for saying hell? Well now they’re saying heck. We never see that reform process, but hey, at least it happened. The last thing this movie needs is to be longer, but I feel like all the important personal growth happened during their teens. We don’t see that. That’s a major problem.

And it was kind of hilarious how all three were grinding on women in the nightclub or picking up a random girl from California yet somehow manage to avoid sleeping with them despite getting absolutely shitfaced in one instance. Oh wait, I forgot, these are good Christian boys. They’d never fuck girls before marriage. Just their guns. Speaking of which, guess what scene doesn’t work immediately after a mass shooting? The scene when they’re little and one of them is pulling out gun after gun, after gun, after rifle from the closet (they were air pistols, right, except maybe the last one?). I’m not sure if that scene would’ve worked for me in a normal week, but it sure as hell didn’t this week.

I don’t know what the hell they were thinking. How someone looked at this footage and kept going is unbelievable. All tact was just thrown out the window. Maybe this could’ve worked with real actors, but I doubt it.

D-

Why not a F? The train sequence works. It’s maybe not as dramatic as it could been as it could’ve used a powerful score behind it, but I’d say it works. Is it worth sitting through 75 minutes of shit to get there? No. Not at all.

Random notes

* That opening scene at the school...what a way to kick a film off. “My God is better than your statistics.” to the complete disregard and distrust of medication.

* URKEL!

* Posters of Full Metal Jacket and Letters From Iwo Jima (Clint doing a Michael Bay-esque like shoutout to himself). I know the kid loves war, but wouldn’t he have preferred Flags? And what better way to show a love for war than having a Full Metal Jacket poster? I know it’s only up there because it’s a WB movie, but way to miss the point of that film.

* It’s amazing how all the Air Force training managed to work out perfectly for Spencer at the end yet he was nothing but a dumb shit during those scenes.

* Speaking of the Air Force scenes, you know who gives the best performance in this film? That one teacher who asks her class if they all agree that Spencer is an asshole. She’s the only person in the film who is giving what’s close to a naturalistic performance.

Yes, the scene where young Spencer pulls an arsenal of air-soft guns (and one real rifle) out of his closet could be transferred, without alteration, to a school-shooting film and feel perfectly at home.

Letters from Iwo Jima is my favorite Eastwood film, but it definitely seems strange for a right-wing 12-year-old American to have the poster for a subtitled Japanese military drama in his room. The Full Metal Jacket poster is fine, though. Regardless of Stanley Kubrick's intentions or feelings, it is definitely a nostalgic favorite among people with a gung-ho war fetish. Just consider R. Lee Ermey's entire career afterward.

My favorite of the many banal-filler moments is when two of the friends and an American girl visit a gelato shop in Venice. We are treated to their entire order ("I'll have...hazelnut!") as the camera surveys the flavors. So bizarre.

As the posters above me have said this really made no sense as a movie because there isn't one. Its just pieces connected randomly to do the 5 minute train incident. Its a pain to sit through aside from the actual incident (which isn't great in itself, why didn't they use any score before it???)

3/10

Thought this was good, far away from Clint's best works, but I enjoyed watching the story of these guys, it's a well made film. Criticism is deserved though for the acting of the main guy in the lead, Spencer, his presence in the scenes is actually OK, but his dialogue feels noticeably artificial. The other dark haired guy is the most believable in his role, but he also had less to do. Nonetheless the film is well shot and scored as how Eastwood can do, and other roles are well cast. It isn't really an eventful film, more of a glorified home video, amateur style collaboration, with pretty nice European scenery in the background. With real actors in the role, and with a bigger emphasis on the threat of terrorism instead of the heroes back story, the film could have been more meaningful and dramatic. There was also something that happened continuously where the camera was turning away from the characters while the last sentence was still being spoken, felt odd. But finally it's just all well enough executed in a pleasant viewing way.

B

"IN THE FACE OF FEAR, ORDINARY PEOPLE CAN DO THE EXTRAORDINARY"

Weren't they soldiers? So, not ordinary at all.

Yeah, that's a pretty dumb tagline given the circumstances.

It's a film that's really about being at the right place at the right time...not sure if really true, but they considered not going to Paris and even not taking that particular train in the film. And then eventually the main reason they ended up in that first class where the terrorist appeared was because they wanted to use better wifi which the seats they actually purchased didn't offer. In a sense they were "jay-riding?" the train there, but because they did they were able to save perhaps tens of lives.

Typical Americans. Think rules don't apply to them.

15:17 TO PARIS

The story as it was is an amazing one when contained to the train and the incident but this film went beyond that to bring us into the lives of the soldiers and their development as men. That was one problem I had with this film. It didn't interest me knowing about their history up to the incident. The other problem was using the actual men involved rather than getting actors to play them. I don't think that experiment worked here. Maybe the film would have been better with true actors. Finally, I think the focus should have been on the terrorists involved and the actions that day. Play the film as a real time event rather than the heavy backstory.

Grade - C