Sorry, this movie sucks

Absolutely Fantastic

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Several reviewers have described Kara Tointon, the fetching young woman who meets the handsome doctor, Dougray Scott, on the train from London to Hasting as "flirtatious." This is a blot on the character's virtue. True, she invites his attention after discovering he's a widower with a young son and needs a wife, and it's true that she almost forces her phone number on him when they're about to part, and gives him a warm kiss to boot. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's not that uncommon. It happens to me every time I take the last train from London to Hastings and I'm not a doctor, not even a graduate of the Technological Institute of Gdansk, as one of the other passengers is.There are six passengers on a train speeding towards destruction at Hastings. A madman we never see has killed the guard, disposed of the engineer, and locked himself inside an impenetrable cabin, intent on suicide and taking the passengers with him. Two passengers die, one of cardiac arrest and the other of gravity, without a drop of blood being seen. So it's not a slasher movie or a horror movie. It's not an action movie either because there is in fact very little in the way of kinetics. Mostly the passengers huddle and try to figure out how to stop the unstoppable train. They bang on doors. They climb outside to uncouple the car but they fail. The viewer is less likely to be thrilled or horrified than gripped by suspense. I mean, when everything seems to fail, what DO you do? But it's a commercial movie and it hits the mark. Dougray Scott is just handsome enough to inspire trust but not envy. It's hard to determine whether Iddo Goldberg, who plays the Polish technician is a "good" guy or a "bad" guy. He misbehaves. He continually drops salvos of F bombs. He looks young but sinister. Worst of all, he smokes in a no-smoking zone.If you want a more ambitious movie, try "Runaway Train," partly written by Kurosawa and directed by Konchalovsky. The obscure but rapid-fire symbolism will have you gasping for breath.

I was bought this as a fun gift from a pound shop and did not think it would be up to much but my wife and I thought we would give it a try one night. So pleased we did as its very enjoyable gripping drama, it had some great character build up at the start and from then the tension built to a good climax.I thought the camera angles was excellent (like a scene with someone battering a door and the camera followed each ram) and the effects were spot on without being to over the top.On the whole a really enjoyable movie with good acting its just a shame a movie like this is not as well received as some of the big Hollywood movies that are sometimes a huge let-down. I think this movie should have had more publicity when released as I had not heard of it before and its such a shame to not see a movie as good as this do better.

This is a British "B"movie thriller. This film has a few high's and low's, but overall it's a decent, albeit unconventional/throwback thriller.The good is that the two main leads here do a fine job. The cast is really only comprised of about 5 speaking parts. Dougray Scott is always good, but Kara Tointon is a pleasant surprise here. SHe looks a bit like Sienna Miller, and might actually be an even better actress. No doubt she looks the part.The film is a bit of a slow-burner - taking at least 45 minutes to get to the meat of what's going-on.I like the idea of Iddo Goldberg's character in the film(Jan Klimowski). A neat backstory for a character who isn't what he appears to be in the film. The only issue I have is that his Russian accent fizzles into western European English at the end of each sentence. The accent was 'a miss'.You might give this a spin as a decent passer of the time, but I wouldn't go in expecting one of those blow-you-away films that you've never heard of, because it will definitely fall short of that expectation.The film does have 'a little' style, and the action scenes are actually admirably done for what they had to work with.62/100some better music throughout would have added A LOT, while I didn't mind the unconventional approach of no explanation of the villain in this tale - I still would have liked a little 'after-the-fact' finishing scene. It would have been nice to see Sarah and Lewis off the train, if only for a minute. There was a brewing chemistry there, and it would have been nice to see Lewis' character come full-circle with his personal life.

The people who made Last Passenger are clearly fans of classic thrillers and have studied the form of their art. The direction, casting and acting are excellent. The look of the film and the level of special effects is impressive, considering the budget. And what a great score! I haven't heard a soundtrack for a thriller this good in decades. IMHO, it's the single best thing about this film.I liked all the characters. I was not bothered, as some other reviewers were, by the absence of any attempt to explain the bad guy's motives. Do we ever understand the motives of these monsters? The writers made the decision to make him simply a malevolent force, and I have no problem with that. It's sufficient that he does what he does. I was with this film and on board for the ride from the start.Unfortunately, the script has a common earmark of films written and directed by the same person: The plot just isn't good enough. There are several junctures in the story where a director would have told the writer (had they been two separate people), "You've got to do better than this." Instead, I'm guessing he said to himself, "I'll direct this so well that no one will notice." Well, we did notice. We noticed that the female lead, as appealing as she is, is given nothing to do in the A story except babysit. We noticed that (as one of the other reviewers here put it) the grandmother character's sole function appears to be to die (after some babysitting). The actresses in this film were really given thankless roles (except when they're thanked for babysitting). And yes, we did notice that, in the end, the main character's solution to his problem is simply to jump from the train (moving at about 90 m.p.h). And he lives! Somehow. Because . . he's the protagonist? Not good enough.A thriller like this runs on a series of escalating dilemmas and solutions. The dilemmas must be dire (which the filmmakers managed). The solutions have to be a few degrees cleverer than any of us would come up with in the moment. This is especially true in a thriller with a premise we've seen more than a few times. The writers are obligated to come up with at least one solution that is smarter than the solutions presented in all of those other runaway train stories that came before theirs. And they did come up with one such solution--the fire and fire-extinguisher idea of blowing up the deck between train cars so that they can access the coupling. It stretched credulity a little bit, but at least it was clever. And original. Bravo! Unfortunately, that's followed by the really lame solution of just jumping from the speeding train--which is what was left with the audience as the credits rolled. It just falls short. Heh. Kind of like a couple of characters at the climax.