The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood)

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Acting kills this as previously reported.

First 60 minutes is middle school through basic training, 15 minutes of traveling Europe, 15 minutes of the event with flashbacks of the event sprinkled in. Movie even starts with a terrible voice over. The drama of the kids growing up is super forced. The drama of failure in the military doesn't work. Almost nothing works actually... I'm surprised this turned out so terrible because it's almost the same type of screenplay that Eastwood used in Sully. This is the result of trying to create a feature length film from a 10-15 minute single event.

All of my score are for the last act, which finally halfway justifies casting real people (the three leads plus a married couple on the train) when put through Eastwood's harrowing reenactment of the event. That gimmick somehow creates both intimate and distancing layers at once and has a truly -- and I think productively -- dissociative effect (especially those close-ups of the husband who reenacts himself being shot), which then leads to final real footage, normally a tired trope of films based on true story, but which gets turned upsides down into something quite moving here.

Before that though... oof. Kid Anthony Sadler sums it up best with "Are you shitting me?" Forget the 'acting' of the real people or their kid actors; Eastwood manages to make Judy Greer come off amateurish, a feat in itself. And just consistently tin-eared and unpleasant-looking throughout, culminating most in a neverending mid-film vacation footage that is so bizarrely tedious it loops right round to trainwreck-fascinating again. Because of Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning and especially Blackhat, I'll never dismiss a corner of acclaims for this kind of things easily, but y'all crazy for this one, (vulgar) auteurists. 4/10

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Originally Posted by Peng

All of my score are for the last act, which finally halfway justifies casting real people (the three leads plus a married couple on the train) when put through Eastwood's harrowing reenactment of the event. That gimmick somehow creates both intimate and distancing layers at once and has a truly -- and I think productively -- dissociative effect (especially those close-ups of the husband who reenacts himself being shot), which then leads to final real footage, normally a tired trope of films based on true story, but which gets turned upsides down into something quite moving here.

Before that though... oof. Kid Anthony Sadler sums it up best with "Are you shitting me?" Forget the 'acting' of the real people or their kid actors; Eastwood manages to make Judy Greer come off amateurish, a feat in itself. And just consistently tin-eared and unpleasant-looking throughout, culminating most in a neverending mid-film vacation footage that is so bizarrely tedious it loops right round to trainwreck-fascinating again. Because of Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning and especially Blackhat, I'll never dismiss a corner of acclaims for this kind of things easily, but y'all crazy for this one, (vulgar) auteurists. 4/10

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Agree with you about the climax being really well done and there's certain things to appreciate about the real people casting. Also, I enjoyed the travelogue stuff just on the basis that it hasn't been do-able for the last 14 months. It's all mundane and unspectacular, but them touring around cities and going out to clubs and bars and such really moved me. Wrote this on Letterboxd a few months back:

"A supremely strange movie that does not really work as a movie. HOWEVER. It does this magic trick in its second half where it accurately depicts the extreme low stakes of international travel in the time before COVID. By pure accident here’s an amazing document of something I have a deep and thorough longing to do and it made me smile. And there’s an Eastwoodian economy to the climax that’s effective and admirable."