Denzel Washington must love playing a train conductor. A year after saving the New York subway in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Washington's reteaming with director Tony Scott to save us all in Unstoppable. This time, he's fighting the train itself, a freighter with a mind of its own that threatens to destroy a city. With Unstoppable, Washington is joining a mini-genre of action movies: the vehicular thriller, in which vehicles turn on their operators and suddenly can't be stopped. Whatever the means of transport, these vehicles adhere to the Kanye West lyric "Run away fast as you can". Here are the best runaway-vehicle movies through the years.
Maybe our fascination with hijacked, unstoppable vehicles began with this silent classic, in which a band of robbers takes over a train and fights off the employees. While most of the action takes place on stationary land, a fight breaks out with the robbers in control of the train, moving at 40 miles per hour. That was fast back then!
Steven Spielberg's first film sees a road-tripping salesman followed by an ominous, slow-moving Peterbilt truck with an unseen driver. The truck is the real star of the movie, destroying a gas station and nearly killing the protagonist several times. The human prevails, sending the truck off a cliff, but its menace hardly fades away.
In this parody of the megahit Airport, an entire flight comes down with food poisoning, leaving the plane in the hands of an inflatable autopilot, Otto. While the comedy classic is not exactly scary, we wouldn't want to ride this runaway plane: Otto's only slightly more congenial than Steven Slater.
This adaptation of the Stephen King book stars a classic Plymouth Fury that seems to have a malicious life of its own. The car, Christine, can regenerate each time it—she!—is destroyed, and uses her immortality to chase down and kill high-school bullies. Christine seemingly can't be defeated, and her reign isn't over yet: a 3-D remake is coming in 2011.
In Sandra Bullock's star-making action movie, she plays a passenger who must keep a Los Angeles bus moving at more than 50 miles per hour, with the help of a tough-guy Keanu Reeves. A terrorist has set a bomb to go off as soon as the bus slows down, because a runaway bus is more interesting than a bus that just blows up. Bullock and Reeves save the day, of course, but her work isn't over ...
Reeves chose not to participate in this sequel, which was maybe well-advised: how many times can one woman get stuck on a vehicle that just keeps going and going? This time, it's a cruise ship controlled by an evil computer hacker. The movie was a critical disaster and had the bad luck to be only the second-scariest cruise-ship movie of the year, after Titanic. Bullock landed on her feet, but she's stayed on dry land ever since.
The third movie by this title, this Ghost Ship is exactly what it sounds like: the story of a ship piloted by the ghosts of its passengers. Spooky! When living people board and try to take over the ship and bring it to land, the ghosts destroy the engine and kill the interlopers. Lesson learned: sometimes, runaway vehicles should be allowed to just run away.
This teen horror flick doesn't have a slasher or vampires. Instead, its action all starts with a runaway roller coaster that kills its passengers. Those who survive have to cope with train derailments and skittish horses. In short, this movie is porn for runaway-vehicle enthusiasts who grew up on Duel and Speed.
OK, so it's not exactly a movie about transportation. But for at least some sedentary film lovers, not being able to stop running is even scarier than a ghost ship or an unstoppable train. The movie that made "Run, Forrest, run!" into a catchphrase shows that sometimes, the most out-of-control vehicles are one's own feet. At least if you're Tom Hanks.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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