You know how at the Oscars when they announce Best Picture,
it’s never the people you know from the movie who get up to accept the award?
It’s always the producers, who are responsible for overseeing the whole
production, including the actors, writers, and directors. The producers take
the responsibility and ownership of the movie. Considering how sharp a producer
has to be when going into production on a new project, I could only assume that
the producers of the new film The 15:17 to Paris are, in fact,
cats who have no idea what a movie even is, because they’re cats.
On closer inspection, the film was not overseen by cats, but
rather produced by actual conscience people, somehow. Clint Eastwood, it turns
out, is both a producer and director on the film, leaving him predominantly
responsible for how bafflingly incompetent it is. Oh sweet god, The
15:17 to Paris is a real mess.
I’ve been passionately interested in film for a little while
now, and to my recollection, Clint Eastwood hasn’t made a single good movie
within the last decade. That may be a controversial opinion, I’ve never been
Eastwood’s biggest fan, but the evidence feels undeniable. Consider his
lifeless Jersey Boys adaptation, where he took a box office
record-breaking (and pretty fun) Broadway musical and made it into a joyless,
wordy drama. Or look at American Sniper, with its dead-eyed baby
doll and absurd bullet time sequences. Eastwood has made increasingly bad
decisions with each passing film. This trend seems to have hit a climax with 15:17,
a fictionalized, narrative film with the real-life, non-actor people involved
playing themselves. If someone who’s still in the game, like Spielberg for
example, decided to make a film this way, it might have turned into an
interesting experiment. Under the sleepy direction of Eastwood, however, this
movie is painfully awkward to watch. Even the talented professional actors in
the piece, like Judy Greer, Jenna Fischer, and Tony Hale, come off as stilted
and confused. That’s no doubt due to the
direction and the fact that their scene partners literally don’t know what
they’re doing.
The film attempts to tell the story of three young men who stepped
up and stopped a mass-shooter from attacking the titular train they happened to
be on, and the lives they led that brought them to that moment. Casting the
actual men is an interesting idea, and to their credit, I did enjoy the
friendship the three of them shared. Unfortunately, you can feel how
uncomfortable and unnatural they are at acting in all their scenes. As a
result, every potentially impactful moment that the movie has is just destroyed.
The awkwardness oozes onto the screen, and you wind up feeling bad for these
heroic men that their story is being botched so badly, with them on board as
participants.
The film jumps back and forth through time, showing how the
three friends met as kids, and the choices that led to their fateful trip to
Europe. If the parts where regular men star as the leads in a studio drama are
uncomfortable to watch, just wait until you get to the scenes where Clint
Eastwood has to direct children!
One scene features them playing with their airsoft guns and
laughing. “I don’t know, there’s just something about war, man,” one kid says
dreamily. The line seems to suggest that he enlisted because going to war
sounds like a fun time, a motivation I would doubt is 100% accurate. Seriously,
screenwriter Dorothy Blyskal has written one of the worst things I’ve seen in a
long time, and the kids’ dialog is especially painful and stilted. That being
said, I do have to give credit to child actor Paul-Mikél Williams, whose
natural abilities manage to shine through this garbage script and direction.
Another feature of the nonsensical nature of the writing is
the characters’ seemingly supernatural abilities. They monologue several times
about how they need to board the train because the universe is calling to them
to do so, as if they already know what’s about to happen. The movie also
transcends the typical depiction of prayer in film by having the characters
literally talk to God and explain that they’ve received answers. I’m sure
they’re attempting to show the power of their faith, but when you add that to
the prophetic feeling that God wants them on the train, it really makes a case
for the movie quietly featuring magical realism. This is maybe the 48th
most upsetting problem that this movie has, but it deserves to be discussed
nonetheless.
Overall, The 15:17 to Paris is boarder-line
unwatchable. It’s awkward, messy, boring, and most of all incompetent. It’s
honestly astonishing to see a movie this troubled be released by a big studio
like Warner Bros. Mr. Eastwood, it’s really, really time to stop.
0.5 out of 5
