It's not like this kind of thing has never been done in Hollywood before. Stars such as Muhammad Ali and Howard Stern have played themselves in biopics, but that's because they were larger-than-life personalities, and while the case of Audie Murphy might seem analogous here, he had already attained years of acting experience before reliving his World War II experiences in To Hell and Back in 1955. Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler, the three young men starring in The 15:17 to Paris, don’t possess the ego, the charisma or the experience to justify their casting, but their very averageness seems to be the point. While Eastwood squeezed great drama out of an incident that lasted just a few minutes in Sully by digging into the aftermath and exploring the psychological toll that being in the spotlight took on Chesley Sullenberger, he and his screenwriter Dorothy Blyskal have taken a different approach here. The attempted terrorist attack that changed the lives of these men takes place in the final twenty minutes, with the build-up consisting of a lot of foreshadowing and an attempt to place these people in context.
That context is Sacramento in the early 21st century, where these three characters are raised in an environment of faith and duty. They meet as rebellious children at a pious Christian school, and bond through their fascination with warfare, playing with toy guns in the woods and poring over WWII battle plans. Their paths in life seem set until Sadler announces his desire to move to a secular school, one where he might have a chance of meeting girls and going to a prom. He was the only one of the three protagonists to not later sign up for the military, and this casual scene is presented as a turning point, one of many that led these three men to board the train to Paris a decade later.
With Sadler gone, the film focuses primarily on Stone and Skarlatos, now played by their adult selves. Both of them join the military and are fuelled by dreams of making a difference and serving their country, but they can’t stop bungling every opportunity that's handed to them. Stone’s hopes of joining the air force are dashed by an eye condition, and he fails in his SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training after screwing up every practical task and missing an exam by oversleeping. Skarlatos does actually make it to Afghanistan, but he manages to leave his kit behind in a village forcing his unit to turn around to retrieve it. And yet, both men maintain a sense that fate is somehow guiding them. “Do you ever feel like life is pushing us toward something, some greater purpose?” Stone ponders at a couple of points in the film, and The 15:17 to Paris is structured as a chronicle of moments and decisions that could have gone one way, but fortunately went another. The decision to visit Amsterdam on the advice of an old man met in a bar; the decision to keep to their schedule and take the train to Paris despite their raging hangovers. One way or another, these men were meant to be on that train.
Is that vague sense of divine providence enough for a movie? I’m not entirely sure. The 15:17 to Paris is, undeniably, a very weird film to watch. Stone, Skarlatos and Sadler actually acquit themselves quite well. There’s a little awkwardness in some of their interactions – mostly in the laid-back scenes where they are just watching a football game or making holiday plans over Skype – but they aren’t egregiously stiff or self-conscious, and they have a natural chemistry. I found the film mostly engaging once it had moved past the draggy childhood section, which actually suffers a little for the distracting presence of recognisable faces in minor roles (Tony Hale and Thomas Lennon as teachers, for example, or the perennially underused Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer as the boys’ mothers). The film moves in a functional way, with Blyskal’s script laying out the events in a straightforward and unimaginative fashion and Eastwood – of course – simply taking the screenplay and shooting it with minimum fuss. The avoidance of traditional cinematic and dramatic tropes is admirable, but it also gives the film a weird, lumpy sense of pacing and a number of scenes that just feel dead on the screen.
The exception to this is the climactic assault on the train, in which Eastwood builds tension through shots of Ayoub El Khazzani (played by professional actor Ray Corasani) boarding the train and preparing his attack in the train toilet, and using dramatic camera angles and close-ups as the terrified passengers flee and Stone springs into action, closely followed by his friends. The ensuing tussle is frantic, bloody and gripping, and watching all of these ordinary people recreating the most dramatic and horrifying moment in their lives gives the film an added emotional force that is remarkable and unique. Perhaps Eastwood’s gamble does pay off after all. I was particularly moved by the presence of Mark Moogalian, who was shot in the neck when he fought with the attacker and is here reliving the time he almost died, as Stone attempts to stem the blood gushing from his wound. Moogalian also gets the movie's best line, when Stone asks him if he’d like to say a prayer and he responds with a gurgled, “No thank you.” I’m not sure any of these guys have a future in movies, but at least one of them has impeccable comic timing.