And they're ALL on board Americana Rail's crack Grand Royale: the Disposable Engineer, the Cute Little Kid, the Arrogant Politician, the Sick Passenger (who needs immediate help), the New Stepmom (who just wants to fit in), the Ex-Quarterback-who-lost-the-Big-Game (but who gets a new chance to save the day), and... the Unlikely Hero! What I mean is, they've already parodied this sort of film in the "Airplane" series and "The Big Bus". Still, this could have been done very well; but there are so many distracting factual errors that we keep getting thrown off....the track. Railroad disaster dramas are hard to pull off, anyway; trains go, or they don't. So they made this one hard to stop, with so many goofy reasons for it that railroaders will be rolling in laughter. (That schtick was tried in 1973's "Runaway", with the same results.) It's not all bad; there is some great British Columbia rail photography to be seen, and the interior scenes are done well. But when the plot says the Grand Royale is doing over 80, we can see it's obviously more like 25 at best, even with the tricky camera angles that are used. Stuff like that is just carelessness. A pity; I wanted to like this movie.
