The 15:17 to Paris

          The 15:17 to Paris is about the 3 men who, on their way to Paris as part of a vacation, countered a potentially devasting terrorist attack on a crowded train. The movie follows these men from childhood all the way to after their heroic deeds and injects you with a good feeling towards those brave people. It's inspiring to watch them so many lives, but other than that, this movie basically fails at everything else.
           Clint Eastwood had somewhat of a good directing streak lately. American Sniper was nominated for Best Picture and Sully proved that he can take any story/recent event and turn it into a solid film. At least that's how it was until this movie came along. While Sully had more depth and more content to it, especially with what came after the plane incident, and American Sniper succeeded in paying tribute to a highly respected military sniper, this movie lacks any effective narrative as it tries to blend elements from both Sully and Sniper: a recent event and paid tribute. The reason why is because the story itself doesn't have enough material to work with. This proves to be the root of almost everything wrong with this movie because the incident alone, although shocking, doesn't exactly have enough meat to justify the production of a full-blown movie.
          This lack of story is obvious when you are you are forced to watch the second act since the entire second act of the movie is nothing but filler. The first act, while still having quite a few unnecessary scenes, at least has development to the main characters and provides some background while also following them into adulthood. The second act kicks in when they decide to take a backpacking trip to Italy and this is where the movie loses its consistency. It spends this entire section following these 3 men as they travel all over Europe doing everything from drinking to partying and visiting popular European tourist sites. It's basically a travel vlog and has a whopping zero character development. It does nothing to advance the plot except maybe explain why they boarded the train in the first place. Now, this wouldn't be as bad if it was maybe less than 15 minutes long, but because it's almost the entire act of this movie I have no choice but to be harsh on it. I fell out of this heartfelt story and instead got troped into watching some dudes in their 20's do things that dudes in their 20's usually do.
          The third act then kicks in with them boarding the train and stopping the terrorist. You know, the scene you all probably want to see? It lasts for 10 minutes. Don't get too excited.
          Besides the filler second act, there is more to this film that didn't work and I'll start with the acting. It's bad. I get the intentions behind hiring the real-life heroes, but you can tell that they've never acted before and it's not their fault. Eastwood insisted on this idea for the sake of realism, but it just weighs down the movie and it doesn't blend well with the acting done by the more experienced actors.
          My other problem with this movie is its use of frame narrative structure with the train incident being the picture and everything else, the backgrounds of the 3 men, being the frame. The movie tells the frame parts of the story through flashbacks and its these parts of the story that make up the whole movie. During the movie, it'll cut back to the train at random to remind you of what's ahead, but these scenes last for about 10 seconds and probably would've worked better if they had kept it all at the end. Because the movie spends so much time in the past, one could say that the flashes to the train are actually flash-forwards, but considering that the focus of the movie is on the train incident, it's unlikely that that's the case.
          Overall, this movie suffers from a bad screenplay and bad acting. It is inspiring to an extent, but you have to suffer through over an hour of subpar content to get to the scene the trailer boasted so heavily. Side note, ignore the trailers. This is not an action-packed thriller. It's a failed character study if it even was trying to be a character study. The first act with them as children growing up and training in the military is fine and the last 15 minutes are also fine, but the in-between shows us that Eastwood never realized that this story, although inspiring and heartfelt, wasn't enough for a full-length movie. Making a movie about these 3 men had good intentions, I'm sure of it, but as far as paying them tribute goes, this movie wasn't the way to do it. 3/10