LAST PASSENGER (2013)

Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Director: Omid Nooshin
Cast: Dougray Scott, Kara Tointon, Iddo Goldberg, Lindsay Duncan, David Schofield
RunTime: 1 hr 37 mins
Rating: NC-16 (Some Coarse Language and Violence)
Released By: Shaw
Official Website: http://www.lastpassengermovie.co.uk

Opening Day: 19 June 2014

Synopsis: A small group of everyday passengers on a speeding London commuter train battle the sociopathic driver who has a dark plan for everyone on-board.

Movie Review: 

At first glance, ‘Last Passenger’ seems like a low-budget rip-off of Tony Scott’s ‘Unstoppable’, which like the former was also about a runaway train.  Nonetheless, Omid Nooshin’s debut feature plays more like a Hitchcokian thriller than a Hollywood action blockbuster, and for the most part largely succeeds at keeping up the suspense for a good one half hours - that is, until you realise it has no motive.

Co-written by Nooshin and Andrew Love, it begs its audience’s patience while setting up its key characters, a half dozen or so night riders who find themselves stranded on a London commuter train whose brakes have been sabotaged. Dougray Scott plays the lead, a doctor and single dad named Lewis Shaler who is travelling home to the London suburbs with his seven-year-old son for Christmas. Kara Tointon is the attractive young woman he befriends along the way, striking up a conversation with some whizzing sparks.

There’s also a hotheaded Polish immigrant (Iddo Goldberg), an overly authoritarian older gentleman always seen with his briefcase (David Schofield), and a kindly grandmother (Lindsay Duncan) whose main role is to play caretaker to Lewis’ kid while Daddy tries to play hero. Only after the first half hour do things get zippier, as Lewis spots a body on the tracks and starts to realise something is amiss. Soon a stop is missed, the brakes are found non-functional and the driver uncommunicatively hell-bent on taking the train straight into the English Channel.

Although there might be some initial suspicion that someone among the six of them could be behind the hijacking, it becomes clear that the real - and only - enemy is the individual who has locked himself in the driver’s compartment and killed both the driver and the guard in the process. Once that is established, all that remains is for the group to work together to try to escape from imminent death, including attempting to operate a handbrake, breaking through the driver’s door and finally decoupling the locomotive.

To Nooshin’s credit, he does generate a fair amount of tension from the proceedings, limited as they are by budget to be set entirely on board two carriages housed at UK’s Shepperton Studios. Together with his d.p. Angus Hudson, Nooshin enhances the urgency with some creative use of the widescreen frame to evoke railway carriage claustrophobia. What however proves his undoing is his reluctance to shed light on certain situational elements, most prominently just ‘who the hell is driving the train’.

Whether to avoid looking stupid or to deepen the sense of mystery, Nooshin skirts around answering the million-dollar question of just who and why is behind the hijacking. There are some red herrings thrown about here and there, but the answer remains as elusive as ever before and after the movie has ended. That determination not to offer any answer may prove less problematic to some audiences, though we cannot deny that it ultimately robbed us of the all-important payoff at the end.

Still, there are some good low-key thrills to be had on board this low-budget excursion, which appears even more impressive once you consider the budgetary constraints he had been working under. It is however lacking in purpose and motivation, and somewhat in credibility as well, which proves to be its own undoing no matter its Hitchcokian ambitions. 

Movie Rating:

(It isn't quite just a rip-off of 'Speed' or 'Unstoppable', but this low-budget thriller with Hitchcokian ambitions is ultimately undone by a lack of purpose)

Review by Gabriel Chong