I want to start out by making it clear to my readers — all six of you — that I wholeheartedly believe that the men who stopped the 2015 Thalys train attack are heroes. They saved hundreds of lives by risking theirs. Undisputedly, they are heroes.
That being said, “The 15:17 to Paris” is a terrible film. It baffles me how Clint Eastwood can go from making a great film based on recent events, “Sully,” and turn around a year later and make an absolute flop.
The film is based on the events of the 2015 Thalys train attack. Well, loosely based. The attack does not appear in the film until the last fifteen minutes of the film. There are short glimpses of it, but that is an awful long way into a two hour- long movie for the titular event to happen. I propose an alternate title: “Three Bros Grow Up, a Couple of Them Join the Military, They Go to Europe, and Right at the End They Stop a Terror Attack.” Granted, that will not fit on the DVD box, but it is much more accurate to the events of the movie.
The film opens with a few quick shots of the train attack, but then it cuts to what I thought was going to be a quick look at the childhoods of Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, and Alek Skarlatos, the three main characters. That assumption was way off, because the film does not cut back to the train until about twenty minutes of clunky dialogue later, when we are graced with another quick shot of the attack, and then quickly taken back to the characters’ childhoods.
We eventually make it all the way through their childhood years and see Stone and Skarlatos join the military, while Sadler does — honestly, the film kind of cuts him out at that point. He pops back up when Stone calls him up and asks him to go on a “backpacking” trip through Europe with himself and Skarlatos. “Backpacking” in this case means wearing backpacks and walking around cities, not trekking through the wilderness. By the time they finally get on the train to go to Paris and stop the attack, there are only about fifteen minutes left.
What I cannot figure out is whether I dislike the awful dialogue or the terrible acting the most. The dialogue was boring at its best and tacky at its worst. It felt forced and unnatural, but that may have been the part of Stone, Sadler, and Skarlatos, who portrayed themselves in the film adaptation of a book they helped write based on real events that actually happened to them. As much as I respect them as people and Eastwood as a filmmaker, this was not the correct choice. As much as I wanted to, I could not connect with the characters, who became caricatures of themselves through their lack of acting experience and broken, clunky dialogue.
What is actually alarming is that Mark Moogalian, the American-born Frenchman that was shot during the incident, portrayed himself in the film. Isabelle Moogalian, Mark’s wife, also portrayed herself. They relived what had to be one of the most traumatic moments of their lives. I guess we all cope in our own ways.
Anyway, “Three Bros Grow Up, a Couple of Them Join the Military, They Go to Europe, and Right at the End They Stop a Terror Attack” is not really worth the $10. It is not really worth the money Warner Bros. spent on the budget. It is a shame that most people will now look to this film as the account of what happened during the 2015 Thalys train attack. Do yourself a favor: read the book. I hear it is better.
