Clint Eastwood turns extraordinary real-life events into a tedious film
With “The 15:17 to Paris,” director Clint Eastwood overwhelms the extraordinary with the mundane, turning the true story of three Americans who helped subdue a gunman aboard a European train into a tedious film.
The movie retraces the 2015 European backpacking trip of Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler, three young men who first became friends as boys in the Sacramento area. Not just the part of the trio’s European tour involving the train attack, but every uneventful Skype conversation and gelato-shop visit leading up to it.
Bradley Cooper and Tom Hanks, stars of Eastwood’s similarly real-life-based “American Sniper” and “Sully,” would have had trouble enlivening this material.