The 15:17 to Paris

This feels like the kinda thing that should be a slam dunk. The true story of three Americans while travelling from Amsterdam to Paris stop a gunman on a train and are awarded the Legion of Honour. But a bunch of poor choices have turned this into a turgid mess of a film. First, casting the three Americans as themselves means you don't have leads who are particularly compelling actors - while they seem like three nice enough guys, everything's pretty much flatly declaimed without much subtext or emotion behind it.

Second - the events that bring us into the movie account for maybe 5-10 minutes of screentime. So there's an awful lot of padding going on - we get the backgrounds on how the three young men met each other at school, followed by the military training of one of them, and chunks of their prior European adventures. And as this goes on it gets less and less interesting - the school stuff has some bonus bizzare casting as comic actors Tony Hale, Tom Lennon and Jaleel White show up as their various teachers and Judy Greer and Jenna Fisher show up as the two white boys' moms (Greer really has been an incredibly wasted presence on screen between this, "Ant Man", and "Jurassic World", none of the wild humour that shows up in her roles on "Archer" or "Arrested Development" have shown up in films). The military training has some goofy moments - concentrating largely on Spencer Stone, his "out of shape" body is clearly a product of wearing loose sweatshirts and as his montage proceeds, he shows off his current more buff look. He comes across as rather petulant when facing minor setbacks in ways that surely can't be intentional.

And then we get a vast set of adventures as the boys traipse through Europe. This feels remarkably like watching someone else's travel videos, where very little of interest actually happens. There's some fairly dire attempts at foreshadowing, as the boys keep on wondering whether they're really going to go to Paris or not, which .. well, we know they will, it's in the goddamn title.

THere's no attempt to give any characterisation or motivation to the gunman, and while the major events are played with reasonable dramatic fidelity, the subsequent legion of honour ceremony is intercut between a recreation and the actual footage.... and the actual footage gives the unfortunate information that, hey, there was this fourth guy, a British man, whose acts have nowhere been acknowledged in the rest of the film.Clearly he did something worth rewarding, but the film isn't going to bother to tell you what that was. Apparently it was far more essential we watch unconvincing flirting in Venice for ten minutes.

So this is a case of weirdly incompetent big-budget film-making. Clint Eastwood may very well have entered the "Alzheimers" point of his career.