THE CHRISTMAS TRAIN
A journalist travels by train across the country to get home in time for Christmas, and he chronicles his adventures.
Dermot Mulroney, playing a distant relative of Mark Twain, books a one-way ticket on the motherfucking Christmas Train from New York to Los Angeles, because he promised his dead father that he'd do what that lazy cunt Twain never could and write a goddamned story about traveling across the United States in a fucking train that will blow the socks off of people around the world, perhaps literally, but who really gives a shit, am I right? I can't even remember this asshole character's name right now, and I literally started typing this five minutes after I stopped watching the damned movie, so he's just Dermot Mulroney from here on out.
And I know Dermot Mulroney is generally a pretty decent actor, but holy shit he's terrible in The Christmas Train. It's like he just slipped into Hallmark mode because he didn't want to bother with a genuine, heartfelt performance, so he puts on a flat, "genial" tone of voice and he flashes a half-hearted little shit-eating grin, trying to be a kindly sort of dude but really just coming across as off-putting and lazy.
And what's the deal with this fucking Christmas Train, anyway? There's some sort of magic on the Christmas Train, apparently, but I never felt it. This whole movie just tries to romanticize the whole train-going experience, to the point where it starts to feel like a paid advertisement by fucking Amtrak, which, come to think of it, this probably is.
So why did old Dermot Mulroney decide to pick this year to board the Christmas Train and write his big train story? The guy's dad didn't just die, so he's had at least a year or two to get around to fulfilling the man's dying wish. Was he just lazy, or did it slip his mind last Christmas?
Danny Glover's in this movie, playing a famous movie director named Max Power, which I'm pretty sure is also the name of the suave alter-ego Homer Simpson made up after reading the power settings on his wife's hair dryer, but whatever floats your boat, dude. He's brought along his trusty script supervisor, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, because he wants her to enjoy her journey on the fabled Christmas Train and become inspired to get out of her comfort zone and write the screenplay for his next sure-to-be blockbuster.
But she used to date Dermot Mulroney once upon a time, when they were both globe-trotting journalists who had a habit of finding themselves in some of the most dangerous war zones of the 21st century. Kimberly eventually decided to walk away, because she was tired of the constant life-threatening terror, so she peaced out and told Dermot Mulroney that she just wanted to chill in a little house with a white picket fence for the rest of her days, because she wasn't in a hurry to get beheaded by one or another band of marauding religious zealots in some bombed-out third world country.
Then they meet on the Christmas Train, and... well, you know what happens next.
Joan Cusack is also in this movie, playing a meddling busybody named Agnes who is secretly an undercover train cop, but that was supposed to be a third act twist, and I just ruined it. Train cops, man. It's a dangerous beat, but somebody's gotta stick their necks out for their fellow train enthusiasts. Why is Joan Cusack in this movie? She's so much better than this crap. I want to put Danny Glover in the same boat, but I've seen him in some true garbage over the years, including a horrifyingly inept Moby Dick riff entitled Age Of The Dragons, in which he attempted to eat the entire state of Utah while chewing scenery portraying Captain Ahab.
So Danny Glover is not too good for this shit, but Joan Cusack? Why you gotta break my heart, Joan Cusack? She's good in the movie, too! I think it's literally impossible for Joan Cusack to deliver a bad performance. She's given next to nothing to do in her role, mostly just standing around next to Kimberly Williams-Paisley and getting herself involved in Dermot Mulroney's business every ten minutes, but she's present and accounted for, trying her best every single time she pops up onscreen.
There's also a couple of old dudes on board, one of them a paranoid geezer who used to work for the train company until they told his crusty ass to take a hike, and the other a one-time petty thief who fell in love with a good woman who turned his life around before she passed away from a terminal case of old timey disease a few months earlier, so now he has no idea what to do with himself and just mopes around the train, stealing other peoples' watches and glasses and fountain pens and hoarding all of the shiny objects in his room like a fucking magpie. But that was another third act twist, and I guess I just spoiled that, too.
I don't really remember most of the middle of this movie, because I was bored out of my fucking skull while watching it. I just sort of drifted away for a little while at some point after the first half hour, thinking mostly about how much I like Robocop, for some reason. I don't want to give you the wrong idea, because I'm not thinking about Robocop all of the time. I'm not deranged. It just pops into my head at irregular intervals, and I'll remember how great that movie was, and that I should probably watch that again sometime, and that I'd rather be watching that again than... whatever the hell the name of this movie is.
Now I'm just thinking about Robocop again. Robocop doesn't take place at Christmastime, does it? It doesn't qualify as a Christmas movie, I don't think. That's too bad.
I don't really like The Christmas Train very much. Have you picked up on that? The train becomes trapped by an avalanche somewhere in the Rocky Mountains late in the narrative. I remember Dermot Mulroney and Kimberly Williams-Paisley trudging through a world of swirling cotton fluff, walking on puffy white blankets in snow shoes and laughing quite a bit because this was supposed to look like a Rocky Mountain blizzard and it just looked like a pathetic mess.
They happen upon some grinning goober chopping firewood outside his ranch house, and next thing you know, the train is moving again, and I have no idea why. The movie just kind of skips over that crucial step between "we need to find a phone and call for help" to "now we're back on schedule with no worries whatsoever", and this just boggles my mind. Did that cow-eyed asshole with the wood ax clear a mountain's worth of snow all by himself? Did he pull the Christmas Train through the fucking Rocky Mountains with his horse-drawn carriage? Inquiring minds want to know.
There's also a young couple who get married on the train, but it doesn't matter because they're just actors. Yeah, Max Power arranged for these actors to pretend to be an engaged couple who are having problems with commitment on the Christmas Train because he wanted to subtly guide Dermot Mulroney and Kimberly Williams-Paisley back together. He also paid an actor to portray a shitty psychic on the Christmas Train, feeding her a whole bunch of info about the pair to make her gift seem legit, to boggle their minds and help seal the deal, getting these two lovebirds back together. He also might have orchestrated the train breaking down to force the couple to go out and search for help, further strengthening their bonds, but I'm not sure.
The point is, the son of a bitch wrote a fucking script (a literal fucking script that Kimberly Williams-Paisley finds and reads) that he followed to the letter, pulling the strings of our two middle-aged ex-lovers from the moment they boarded the Christmas Train. That was the final third act twist. Because The Christmas Train needed three fucking third act twists.
Holy shit, this movie sucks. I don't really have anything good to say about the whole thing, except that I liked Joan Cusack and felt sorry for her, because she deserves so much better than this filth. I was shocked at how little The Christmas Train engaged me on any level. I was ready and willing to be swept away by a charming little story about two old flames reconnecting on a romantic train ride across the country at Christmastime, but that's not what I got. What I got was a pounding headache and a million pounds of tube steak. That was a Sewer Shark joke for my fellow Sega CD Fan Club members.
I admit I found myself curious as to how closely this TV-movie adaptation followed the plot of David Baldacci's original novel, so I bought a cheap copy of the book at the grocery store this morning and read the whole thing in about an hour. I wish I hadn't bothered, because the book and movie are essentially the same mediocre thing, just in different mediums. The book obviously fleshes out the characters more, because it's a book, with more space to devote to such matters, but the only plot deviations are pretty minor. The only difference in Agnes from page to screen is that in the book she was as big as a house and said "honeypie" quite a bit. She's an undercover train cop in both versions.
Tom (Dermot Mulroney's character) is a little more cynical in the book, but still essentially the same character. The real reason why he's taking the train over Christmas is a little different in the book, however. In the book, Tom got put on a no-fly list after he lost his shit when a security guard accidentally touched his dick with a metal detector wand. I'm not kidding. He had a meltdown in the airport after a security guard inadvertently grazed his wiener during a routine search and as a result, he was banned from flying for two years in the continental United States. So he uses this as an excuse to fulfill his father's dying wish and write a story about traveling across the country via train, something that Mark Twain allegedly never got around to doing. The Mark Twain connection is also a little stronger in the book, with repeated references to Twain's work peppered throughout the text.
And there isn't one Christmas Train in the books, but two, with Tom switching from one train to another to finish his journey a little less than halfway through the story. The set of characters also changes quite a bit with the switch in trains, keeping the book's cast a bit more diverse. The old thief is pretending to be a priest in the book, so he never tells anybody anything about his past, and as such we don't get to know him at all, learning his history through an exposition dump via train cop Agnes, so in this case the movie actually improves upon its source material. Max Power has a personal assistant in the novel who doesn't really add anything to the story, so his removal from the movie's script is inconsequential.
The biggest change lies in the third act, with the Christmas Train's incapacitation in the mountains. After an avalanche blocks the tracks, instead of a momentary inconvenience, this becomes a life and death situation after the train eventually runs out of fuel before any emergency personnel can reach the train's remote location. Tom and Eleanor do set out to find help at what they hope is a nearby resort, and nearly freeze to death before they reach civilization. While they're alone, Tom proposes to Eleanor, and she says yes, then their tent is destroyed in the blizzard and they nearly die overnight, being found by a wandering child staying at the resort the next morning. As it turns out, the pair were mere yards away from the resort the whole night, unable to see more than a few inches in front of their faces in the raging snowstorm, which has since cleared.
That afternoon, Tom and Eleanor lead a large caravan of folks on horseback up the mountain with food, water and blankets to aid the stranded train passengers, who have had to abandon the train in the interim, seeking refuge in a nearby railway tunnel. Everybody survives the ordeal, and the track is cleared and a new, fully-fueled locomotive is attached to the train, allowing it to continue its journey to Los Angeles, one day behind schedule.
The only other difference between the novel and the movie is that only Tom learns the truth about Max Power's epic deception, choosing bizarrely to leave Eleanor in the dark regarding all of the shenanigans afoot on the Christmas Train. Oh, and the psychic in the book dresses like Miss Cleo, and she wasn't hired by Max Power to do anything. She's just a crazy lady who thinks she can read minds.
So I just wasted even more of my time satisfying my own mild curiosity after seeing the original novel The Christmas Train on a shelf at a local grocery store. I did find a religious pamphlet wedged in between the book's pages after I got home, warmly informing me that if I fail to accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, I will burn in hell for all eternity, so that was just a bonus.
The book's prose isn't anything special, and the story is almost identical to its film adaptation, with only a few minor differences made mostly to smooth out the movie's plot, simplifying matters in the act of adapting the novel, which is perfectly acceptable. So the book isn't inherently better, although I actually finished reading the book in about half the time it took me to watch the movie, so I guess that makes the book the superior version of The Christmas Train by default.
Either way, The Christmas Train? More like The Christmas Trainwreck! That's what I get for channeling my inner Gene Shalit. Did you know that Gene Shalit isn't dead? He's 92 fucking years old! So not entirely dead, at any rate, and good for him. Do you think he's seen The Christmas Train? I hope not. The experience would probably kill the poor bugger. Hell, it nearly killed me. That's an exaggeration. It only made me wish I were dead. And it kicked the holy crap out of my Christmas Spirit, leaving it curled up in the fetal position on the bathroom floor, crying and bleeding and feeling sorry for itself. I wish I could tell the sad bastard that it gets better, but then I'd be lying.
Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go drink a thousand beers and watch Robocop. I'm just kidding. I hate beer. So I'll just get blackout drunk on cheap whiskey while I watch Robocop, which is a thing I don't do very often.
Christmas In July! - The aforementioned scene involving out romantic leads wandering out in a lazily dressed copse of trees with some bits of pillow stuffing floating around their heads is just the dumbest thing, and I have no idea how I as a viewer was meant to take that crap seriously.
Third Act Shenanigans - This third act is nothing but some dumb fucking shenanigans.
Scrooged! - That old thief who lost his wife of thirty-nine years does learn how to be a better person who doesn't steal shit from others without cause without his late lady love to keep him on the straight and narrow and let the joys of the season into his heart once again thanks to the kindly folks aboard the Christmas Train.
Small Town Salvation - I know this one may be stretching it, but I feel like it counts because the Christmas Train is merely a stand-in for one of those bucolic small towns that makes cynical city folks rethink the priorities in their busy lives, giving them a chance to take a step back and enjoy the simple pleasures in life. It's the same damned thing, only on rails, so this counts.
VERDICT: DERAILED
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