MONEY TRAIN
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: An insult. A stupid and incompetent movie that doesn't even have the benefit of being trashily enjoyable. Weslely and Woody would do well to leave this off their resumes.
MONEY TRAIN is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. It's not simply idiotic, it's contemptuous of its audience. It tries to make us swallow things that a better movie would be stopped cold by or just plain omit entirely. It's a waste of Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, who are enjoyable actors in their own rights but are nauseating here. It's not even fun as trash.
Woody and Wesley star (maybe that's not the right word) as New York City Transit Authority police. They have a job which could actually be the core of a really interesting movie: one of them plays drunk possum to attract chain-snatchers and the other does lookout. I had a whole headful of legal and ethical questions surrounding this, raised by a documentary I'd seen on the subject once, but the movie does not waste any time with being intelligent or thought-provoking.
See if you can follow this. They chase a kid down the tunnel and into the station where the "money train", the heavily armored car that picks up all the cash from the token books, is parked. The guards on the train see this kid running at them, lift their MACHINE GUNS, shout "Halt!" and then open fire when the kid doesn't stop running at them. Blam, the kid's dead. Then Woody and Wesley show up, and of course the other TA cops hate them (why?), and a pushing match starts, and someone gets decked, and... I covered my face. I'd seen enough. I've never seen a movie work so hard and in so little time to destroy, systematically, any chance of being credible or interesting.
Fed up with the BS at their job (most of it their own goddamned fault), Woody and Wesley hatch this plot about how to rob the money train. Hence the title, in case some of you (all two of you) didn't figure it out yet. Then there's this subplot about a maniac who torches token book clerks, *and* a love story, *and* a holdup -- no, two holdups, sorry, easy to lose track in a movie this braindead -- *and* a mob boss who wants his money. There wasn't a minute when I gave a horse's ass about any of it.
Neither Woody nor Wesley play characters that are interesting for a single minute. We do not care about them. They are not interesting. They are noisy, loud, stupid, foolish jerks who whould have flunked out of the police academy. They deserve to get shot -- or run over, as the case may be. They only exist to rehash the kind of dynamics that was *written* into a movie like WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP, and which simply does not exist here. They are idiots, and we're expected to root for them. Bullcrap.
The movie is completely schizophrenic in its tone and texture. What exactly is this mess? A cop movie? Police procedure is not given a moment's genuine thought anywhere. A thriller? The subplot with the Token Booth Killer is inept, a throwaway that should have been ditched in the rewrite. A comedy? The few jokes that do work are wasted. A drama? All dramatic tension between both principals is freeze-dried and off-the-rack. There's not a moment in the movie where I felt like I was listening to genuine human beings talk; it's all Screenwriterese, that bizarre analect where every sentence ends in a punchline and the primary mode of expression is the unique conjunctions of four-letter words. (Actual dialogue excerpt: "Fuck you." "What?" "You heard me: Fuck *you*." "No: FUCK *YOU*!")
Look. I'll be honest here. I've tried writing screenplays, and even *I* suspect that if I tried to pitch this mess, I'd get laughed out of the office. Anyone interested in hearing my ideas for a few good movies can write me and hear my pitch, because God knows I know I can do better. I've weasted enough time on this piece of tripe.
A big, fat, hairy, SCREAMING zero out of four tokens.
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