Unstoppable (12A)

Unspeakable, more like. Tony Scott, having directed some of my least favourite movies of all time (Man on Fire, Domino), adds to his charge-sheet with another bumptious slam-bang thriller.

This one's about a runaway train with hazardous chemicals on board, ready to devastate rural Pennsylvania unless a couple of regular guys can exercise their heroic ingenuity to stop it. Sounds like a job for veteran driver Denzel Washington and rookie conductor Chris Pine, shrugging off their private family woes to go in pursuit of the train, now "a missile the size of the Chrysler Building". Scott keeps cutting away from the speeding train to TV newsflashes reminding us how close we are to disaster, though everything is geared to bump against the buffers of a happy ending. Long before this terminus we are reassured about the train's fate by shots of people punching the air and yelling YEEEARGH! a lot. That's exactly what I'd do, but only if I heard that Scott had decided to retire from movies.