Transsiberian
"Transsiberian" has sex. It has drug smuggling. It has Ben Kingsley in a Russian accent. But the movie is nonsense, a thriller content to throw twists and peril around until something grabs you. Nothing ever does. You wonder where director Brad Anderson might have been headed with a movie starring Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer as Roy and Jessie, a nice American couple who decide to return from Beijing to Moscow via the Trans-Siberian express. The movie's headed toward trouble, of course. Unfortunately, there's never a moment where you can't see Anderson and his co-writer, Will Conroy, yanking on the strings.
Somewhere on the trip, Roy returns to the sleeper cabin with Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) and Abby (Kate Mara). He's handsome. She's shifty and younger, her eyes ringed with enough eyeliner to make her look trashy and goth at the same time. Nothing at all kinky jumps off between these four. But at some point they're separated during a stopover, which gives Carlos plenty of time to seduce Jessie, for Jessie to respond in a way that makes sense only for a thriller in desperate need of a second act. When Roy and Jesse are reunited, she discovers they have to share their cabin with Kingsley's drug detective.
It's unclear what particular event in "Transsiberian" was intended to generate enough suspense to last for 110 minutes. The movie tries everything. The sawing strings of the musical score suggest that "Trans-Siberian Express" might be another way of saying "Jaws." Anderson even resorts to having one character hang off the door of a different speeding train. Guns are shot. Babushka dolls that may be full of drugs are found. Annoying coincidences pile up. And Mortimer gets to do some of her least convincing nervous acting, while Harrelson, in playing Roy as unflappably happy, comes closer than he ever has to reincarnating the polite dolt he played on "Cheers."
For about 12 years, Anderson has been making small, clever movies about the intersection of life, kismet, and sometimes metaphysics and the supernatural. His 10-year-old romantic comedy, "Next Stop Wonderland," is his best-known movie. But Anderson's subsequent films - "Happy Accidents," "Session 9," "The Machinist" with a gaunt Christian Bale - have tried to invest genre movies with interesting moral and philosophical ideas.
"Transsiberian" is his most pedestrian exercise, lacking the psychological and spiritual tension implied in the opening scenes. Roy is a Christian. Jessie's a reluctant one, having turned to God after a wild past. Their church had been aiding Chinese children, and before these two ever see a train, we hear a minister telling his flock that, when it comes to right and wrong, there's always a choice - and faith is the one undeniably good option. That moral reminder never bears dramatic fruit. The real choice here is even more basic than that. Instead of getting on that train in Beijing, Roy and Jessie should just have stayed for the Olympics.
Video
