I literally wrote this after watching the movie on 5, mainly because I am a railway enthusiast and hate Van Damme movies. But because of the railway content I did raise a couple of points. Firstly, the shots of the switch tower with frantic German signalmen trying to rouse the drunken freight train driver were quite good, if not hilarious! Another point is this, when Van Damme and co uncouple their section of train from the other section, the air hoses part and all, but the train does not stop! They resort to the coaches handbrake, which for some reason the mighty Van Damme cannot turn without the aid of 50 people! In reality the train would have stopped dead because of a lack of air pressure holding the brakes off. Also, the engine kept on plowing on despite being gutted internally by fire! The crashes were dodgy, the trains looked like models off my layout upstairs, and the flames had the usual "out of scale with the rest of it" syndrome. When the two trains finally meet on the grade crossing, the loco of the freight train explodes, but then it suddenly is in great shape again, despite having clipped the end of a SOLID STEEL passenger train! When the Apache's open up on the main locomotive, it suddenly stops as though the directors re-wrote the laws of physics! I thought it was dead funny, cheap (the readily obvious H0 scale models!), and ridiculous all round, even for a non railway enthusiast its bad! So watch for high octane, low budget drama, but expect glaring errors! (the rest of the story was poor!)
Review of Derailed
