Warner Bros. Pictures
True stories have been a staple of the movies practically since the dawn of cinema. From the silent era’s Napoleon to 2017’s The Disaster Artist, true stories brought to life on the big screen, usually with a major star or stars in the lead role(s), have been a draw for more than a century (the first recorded true story movie was 1899’s Major Wilson’s Last Stand).
But having the real person or people playing themselves on screen is a rare occurrence. Baseball great Jackie Robinson played himself in the biopic of his life, Audie Murphy played himself in a film based on his WWII career, The Beatles were The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, Muhammad Ali floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee in The Greatest, Howard Stern relived his life story in Private Parts, and FAA National Operations Manager Ben Sliney was quietly cast as himself in United 93 (he was the person who made the call to ground all air traffic on 9/11, his first day on the job). And now Clint Eastwood has gone this route with his latest movie, The 15:17 to Paris.
The 15:17 to Paris tells the story of three Americans who bravely and successfully thwarted a terrorist attack on a train headed from Amsterdam to Paris in 2015. The three young men — Alek Skarlatos, Spencer Stone and Anthony Sadler — and some of the actual passengers on the train, relive those few minutes that changed their lives and it’s a gripping and exciting 20 minutes, but there’s more than an hour of movie before that which touches briefly on the friendship of the three as boys, Sadler’s military service (and barely that of Skarlatos), with the bulk of the movie following Sadler and Stone wandering around Europe before meeting up with Skarlatos in Germany. It’s actually a bit mind-numbing, not building up any tension to the event on the train (or providing the guys with a good demo reel for other acting jobs). A lot of their dialog, which comes off as ad-libbed, is painfully stilted and Sadler, who gets the most focus, barely registers more than one expression throughout the movie.
But the attack on the train is heart-pounding and you have to commend the men, as well as Mark and Isabelle Moogalian, for agreeing to relive this traumatic event. Sadler was seriously injured by the terrorist with a box cutter, and Mark Moogalian was shot and nearly died but Sadler’s military training kicked in and saved the man’s life. So it’s hard to imagine living that out in real life and then agreeing to do it again for a movie. This being a Clint Eastwood movie, he focuses solely on the Americans involved in the incident which makes the final moments (using actual footage) of four men receiving commendations from the city of Paris a bit puzzling, the film itself omitting Brit Chris Norman who is seen in the file footage receiving a medal. (There was also another French passenger known only as Damien A. who was the first person to attempt to tackle the terrorist but he has wished to remain anonymous.)
While the movie spends a lot of time going nowhere, there is also another major distraction — too many recognizable faces popping up early in the movie including Judy Greer as Skarlatos’ mother, Jenna Fischer as Sadler’s mother, Thomas Lennon as the principal of the Christian school the boys attend, Tony Hale as a gym teacher and Jaleel White as a teacher. It really becomes a bit too much, but once the guys hit Europe it’s amateur hour all the way. The 15:17 to Paris is 20 minutes of greatness wrapped in 94 minutes of mediocrity. But, oh, those 20 minutes.
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has released The 15:17 to Paris on DVD, Blu-ray and HD and 4K Digital, and the Blu-ray video looks absolutely spectacular. The image is crisp, clear and colorful, looking gorgeous even as scenes switch from the bright daylight of Rome to a dark bar in Germany. Just a terrific presentation. The audio, however, seems to be a little problematic. The disk features both a Dolby Atmos track and a DTS-HD 5.1 Audio track, which is ultimately unnecessary as the Atmos is the preferred track (but the disk auto defaults to the 5.1 track). The problem with the sound on both tracks is that, on my disk anyway, there is a weird echo with most of the dialog, like it was all recorded in a cave. I know it’s a problem because the audio on the bonus features sounds perfectly fine. It may be an aberration, but I found it distracting especially when listening with headphones (and checking a different movie resulted in no echo). The echo is also present on the Digital HD version, even when the kids are playing in the woods. It’s very odd.
The Blu-ray includes two bonus features:
- The 15:17 to Paris: Making Every Second Count (8:10) features Skarlatos, Sadler and Stone taking us through the incident and comparing it to how it’s depicted in the movie.
- The 15:17 to Paris: Portrait of Courage (12:25) features Eastwood and others discussing casting the real people and those folks talking about what it was like re-enacting that day.
And that’s it. But it’s actually a decent 20+ minutes of material that doesn’t overlap one with the other. The movie is recommended only for the last few minutes and the disk itself is questionable as far as the sound is concerned. Great video, iffy audio and some decent bonus features. It’s hard to whole-heartedly say this is a disk to add to your library, but it is sure to appeal to some.
The 15:17 to Paris is now available on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment which generously provided Hotchka with a Blu-ray versions of the film for reviewing purposes.
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