Boring

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Far away from a great film. Very intriguing and attractive location in Siberia is always challenging for the audience that you just have to check what is behind that. I love this kind of movies, but there's just too much cliché in the screenplay. Good guys vs bad guys - OK, it is hard to avoid this, but there can be a huge spectrum of this, from way good to super bad. This one is more bad than good. Not to be so harsh I'll say an average. The main protagonists are two quite naive Americans on a charity mission in China. It is kind of naive way as well how they easy connect with 2 very suspicious passengers. Carlos is just too intrusive and Abby doesn't talk at all, at first. Interesting location, countryside, great actors, good plot, but from all these good elements we got nothing but an average TV-movie for a boring rainy afternoon.

The more of Harrelson I see, the more my respect for his work grows. We see his struggle to fight back at any cost. I seriously loved this film.This film has something which lots of films in this genre are missing, it has heart. Harrelson seems to have been born for this role. He has more one liners than any character in recent memory.Each line is typically vulgar but even if offensive it is near impossible not to laugh. Woody Harrelson has just the right cult status and persona for this type of film.Woody Harrelson's performance is terrific. There are some pretty funny scenes, and you will laugh from beginning to end. The small cast was obviously having a great time when they made it, and all four characters did a very good job of fitting with the style of the movie.And so our heroes all long for symbols of childhood: family, friends, old school amusement parks, babies, dogs, snack foods, 80s media, Betamax, community etc, anything that existed before the technological leaps of the early 90s escalated technocapitalism and ramped up the postmodern experience. But more so, these films reflect humanity's inability to even imagine or conceive of a future. It's a good movie, it actually is funny, all the blood (which there's plenty) fits alright.. The first thing I wanted to do when the credits began to scroll, was get up from my couch, find myself a cast-iron skillet and run outside to smash some brains! All in all it's worth watching. All the acting was good. So, yeah, why not, check it out. Woody Harrelson is unsurprisingly the movie's saving grace. He's got great one liners, and his charisma alone carried the movie for me.

I'm a sucker for a train film and this one has a decent cast so thought I would give it a try. The storyline is basically good, although at times I felt if it had just taken a slightly different turn it could have been so much better. I'm not normally a fan of Woody Harrelson but he played his part well, Ben Kingsley is a fine actor who is always worth watching, Kate Mara and Eduardo Noriega were also convincing. However, Emily Mortimer seemed to be working with the objective of making Jessie possibly one of the most annoying female characters ever to appear in a film. To be fair she can't be blamed for the script which dictated some of her character's more implausible actions, but her quivering, breathless, permanently agitated performance became more and more exasperating as the film progressed. I seriously wanted to push her right off that train! She is normally a good actress but I thought she was horrible in this role, turning what could have been an interesting character into an irritating airhead. If you can overlook the emotional excess of Jessie, and also the fairly patronising, stereotypical portrayal of Russian people, this is a decent enough film. It's watchable and its rating on IMDb is probably about right (currently 6.7). Could have been better but could also have been worse.

"Transsiberian" can be described as a train thriller for the twenty- first century. Train thrillers were once quite popular; several of Alfred Hitchcock's films, for example, include significant scenes set on a train, including "The Lady Vanishes", "Shadow of a Doubt", "Strangers on a Train" and "North by North-West". The sub-genre, however, declined in the latter part of the twentieth century as aircraft began to replace trains as the preferred medium for long-distance travel in America and most other parts of the world. The film is officially described as a Spanish-German-British-Lithuanian co-production, and is probably the only example of a Spanish-German- British-Lithuanian co-production I have ever seen. Indeed, it is probably the only example of a Spanish-German-British-Lithuanian co- production anyone has ever seen. In the modern age, however, even multi- national European co-productions need to work for the Yankee dollar, so "Transsiberian" was directed by an American, Brad Anderson, and revolves around the adventures of an American couple abroad. The couple in question, Roy and Jessie, have been working in China as part of a Christian mission, and because Roy is something of a train buff decide to return home via Moscow on the Trans-Siberian Railway. (That would be the normal spelling in English, even if the makers of this film prefer the bizarre "Transsiberian"). On the journey they befriend another American woman, Abby, and her Spanish boyfriend Carlos. About the first half-hour of the film is taken up with little more than small-talk between the two couples and we wonder when the thrills are going to start. And then, of course, they do. Roy mysteriously goes missing from the train and it looks as if we are in for an unacknowledged remake of "The Lady Vanishes", but a few minutes later we learn there is a rational, and perfectly banal, explanation for his disappearance; he missed the train in while sightseeing in Irkutsk, will catch the next train, and all Jessie needs to do is to wait at the next stop until they are reunited. And so the film sets off on its own roller-coaster journey in the course of which it repeatedly turns from one type of thriller into another. From a "missing person" thriller it becomes a "girl in peril from a charming but sinister stranger" thriller, and then a "woman wrongly suspected of murder" thriller, and then a "some-other-type-of-thriller", and then a .......well, you get the general idea. This sudden, continuous switching from one storyline to another means that the film never has a chance to arouse much interest; as soon as we have got interested in one scenario, it place is quickly usurped by another. The other thing I disliked about the film was the way it, despite being a Spanish-German-British-Lithuanian co-production, pandered to American paranoia about Abroad, especially about Russia and Eastern Europe, a paranoia which has been all to obvious in a number of recent Hollywood movies. Roy and Jessie are the quintessential innocents abroad, good Godfearing American folks who blunder into a nightmare when they travel to foreign parts with the best of motives. The Cold War may be over, but Russia is still a dangerous, hostile place for innocent Americans, a land of gangsterism and corrupt officialdom which may just be two sides of the same counterfeit coin. Even Western Europeans are not necessarily to be trusted; Roy and Jessie discover to their cost that their Spanish fellow traveller Carlos may be as big a threat to them as any Russian. .Probably the best acting performances come from Ben Kingsley as a Russian detective and Eduardo Noriega as the handsome and charismatic but sinister Carlos. Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer are both a bit anonymous, but I wondered if this was a deliberate attempt to emphasis Roy and Jessie's "Mr and Mrs Average" credentials. The characterisation of Roy may owe something to the common British preconception that trainspotters are all anorak-clad nerds who desperately need to get a life. There is some attractive, atmospheric photography of the snowbound Russian landscapes, but overall "Transsiberian" is a film which does not really hang together and relies too heavily on xenophobic fears. If it was an attempt to emulate Hitchcock's train thrillers, it falls a long way short of the Master's work. 4/10