For a professedly Hitchcockian thriller, Brad Anderson’s follow-up
to The Machinist is a little obvious. Some nice Christian women
have checkered pasts? No shit. Ben Kingsley looks awesome in a furry
Russian hat? So true. But if you concentrate very hard and don’t let
the blaring danger cues spoil the fun, Transsiberian is an
entertaining film. Just don’t expect finesse—and suffer the
xenophobia in silence.
Jessie (Emily Mortimer) and her husband, Roy (Woody Harrelson), are
total squares. After wrapping up a vacation-length mission in China
with their American church, they hop aboard the Trans-Siberian Express
en route from Beijing to Moscow. Roy is obsessed with rail gauge
differentials across national borders (nerd!), but he loosens up with
some hard-drinking Russian types in the dining car as the abstemious
Jessie looks on. Soon, however, their exotic adventure is thrown off
kilter by the arrival of two cabinmates, sexy Spaniard Carlos (Eduardo
Noriega) and withdrawn Seattleite Abby (Kate Mara), who show off their
libidos and suspicious luggage with equal abandon. When Roy fails to
reboard the train in Irkutsk, the film’s tone changes abruptly. Russian
train attendants give Westerners the evil eye, the liquored-up dining
car starts to look menacing, and the music gets overbearing.
I could’ve used a little more subtlety around the set piece at the
end of the film (abandoned gulag, really?), but the acting and the
basic mechanics of the plot—characters morphing from good to bad
and back again—are fine. It’s also interesting to see Russians as
villains in the movies again. Unfortunately, filmmakers so far are
falling back on KGB stereotypes instead of trying to figure out what
makes the new Russia so illegible to Western observers.
