The 15:17 to Paris Is a Benign Ode to Male Bonding

The tale of three men who managed to avert a planned shooting on board a train, The 15:17 to Paris dodges the pitfalls many of director Clint Eastwood’s films have fallen into. For starters, it never assumes that dim lighting, slow pacing and a lengthy running time amount to depth. In fact, the film says its piece in 90 minutes and ends there. While it stars real-life subjects Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone as themselves — professional actors play the three men as children — this never becomes a gimmick, and they ultimately prove to be fairly capable performers. 

The 15:17 to Paris begins in 2005, with a narrative following its characters from childhood to those tense moments on the train — but as you might expect, much of the narrative is old-fashioned in exactly the way we've come to expect from the famously staunchly conservative 89-year-old Eastwood. The first two-thirds play like a military recruitment exercise. (Sadler is the only of the three protagonists who never served in the armed forces.) In films like White Hunter, Black Heart, Unforgiven and Mystic River, Eastwood showed himself adept at exploring the complex intersection of masculinity and violence. The 15:17 to Paris, on the other hand, is a carefree ode to male bonding.

Last year, Richard Linklater’s underrated Last Flag Flying depicted the flipside of a similar coin: a much older but similarly close group of friends explores the dichotomy of valuing their military service but hating the human cost of war. One could take away from 15:17 the notion that a tour of duty is akin to working in a particularly chaotic emergency room, with no risk of actually losing one’s life. American can-do spirit triumphs, even if Eastwood concludes with video footage of François Hollande celebrating the prevention of violence onboard that train as an international co-operative effort.

Compared to Eastwood's foul American Sniper, The 15:17 to Paris is relatively benign, but it still glosses over a true story that was almost certainly more complicated and less reassuring.