Derailed (2002)

Director:

Bob Misiorowski

Writers:

Boaz Davidson (story)
Jace Anderson (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

5 November 2002 (Russia)

Genre:

Action | Thriller

Tagline:

The deadliest disease ever discovered is about to be unleashed on the world

Plot:

On an out of control train holding hostages and high-tech bio-weapons agent Kristoff (Van Damme) becomes...

Plot Keywords:

Train | Virus | Terrorist | Hijack | Female Criminal

Cast

  (Cast overview, first billed only)

Jean-Claude Van Damme	...	Jacques Kristoff
Tomas Arana	...	Mason Cole
Laura Harring	...	Galina Konstantin (as Laura Elena Harring)
Susan Gibney	...	Madeline Kristoff
Lucy Jenner	...	Natasha
Jessica Bowman	...	Bailey Kristoff
Kristopher Van Varenberg	...	Ethan Kristoff
John Bishop	...	Bob Sterling
Binky van Bilderbeek	...	Angus Riley (as Bernard Van Bilderbeek)
Dayton Callie	...	Lars
Simone Levin	...	Catherine (as Simona Levin)
Sandra Vidal	...	Cynthia
Stefanos Miltsakakis	...	Stavros
Jimmy Jean-Louis	...	Henry
George Stanchev	...	William

Also Known As:

Death Train (USA) (working title)
Terror Train (Europe: English title)

MPAA:

Rated R for violence and language.

Runtime:

89 min | USA:113 min

Country:

Aruba | USA

Language:

English | German

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

Finland:K-15 | Iceland:16 | Australia:M | South Korea:15 | Argentina:16 | Germany:16 | Norway:15 | Philippines:PG-13 | Singapore:PG | Spain:13 | UK:15 | USA:R

Filming Locations:

Bolshevik, Bulgaria

Company:

777 Films Corporation

Trivia:

Jean-Claude Van Damme broke a hand while getting knocked down by a stuntman on the set in the final fight scene.

Goofs:

Errors in geography: Referring to the road sign which says in the film "crossing the Slovakian border" the main problem is, that Germany and Slovakia does not have a common border.

Movie Connections:

Edited into Direct Contact (2009)

Terrible fun!

I have read that Van Damme has since admitted to being embarrassed by Derailed, which I can understand but at the same time I find to be a little sad. True, the movie is something of a disaster, but I wish people would have a bit of an open mind about movies like this. The movie is almost cartoonishly bad, so I really wonder what the tone was in the air when they were making it (surely they had to know that they were making a terrible movie), but I will venture to say that the badness of a movie like this doesn't at all make it unwatchable. On the contrary, I think it makes it more fun, the way a wildly over-the-top movie like Shoot 'Em Up is more fun than something that is just a little too much, like some of Seagal's movies. As they say, for some reason people often forgive extreme excesses more than mild excess. The Grindhouse team certainly understands this.

Also, just like it should have been clear to the production team that they were making a classic bad movie, it is also clear from the minute you see the cover box (which has one of those direct-to-video appearances that is so thorough that the DVD case itself has an appearance of hollowness – I almost expected to see a DVD-R in there) what kind of movie this is. But many people, myself included, are such dedicated Van Damme fans that we will watch anything he makes, even if we are fully aware that the movie is a – ahem – train wreck.

From the very opening we get an almost home-movie feel, like the kind of weekend video that some kids would make with their friends using their parents video camera and cutting it with something like iMovie. A woman breaks into a highly secured bunker to steal a biological weapon with astonishing capabilities to kill enormous numbers of people, and has so little trouble doing it it's almost funny. She is able to casually beat the crap out of some security guards, maybe because she has some cool yellow sunglasses on.

Before long she finds herself being escorted across the border by Jacques Kristoff (Van Damme), an international agent who doesn't know anything about what she's carrying and who's job is so secretive that his own wife and family don't even know the truth about what he does. It's because of this that he soon finds himself suspected by his family of having an affair and soon everyone is against him as he sets out to save the world.

The supporting cast of baddies is so bad that it literally is the funniest thing in the entire movie. There is one scene early in the film where a few of the bad guys are filing into one of the train cars full of terrified passengers, and one of them (the black guy) looks almost directly at the camera as he passes it, and the expression on his face is so outlandishly goofy that that moment alone made me think that the whole movie is something of an inside joke, like they watched the dailies and laughed hysterically when they saw things like this (like I did), and said "Yeah, put that in! CLASSIC!!"

I have to admit that on a certain level I did enjoy the movie. Yes, it's a bad movie and there is no denying that, but it is still enjoyable on a level that truly bad movies are not. Still, I'm trying to come up with something specific that I enjoyed, and it's not an easy task. The performances are horrendous, the writing is worse, and the special effects and the stunts might be the most famously bad parts of the movie.

But in that, I think is where you can still enjoy it. When things are so bad that it is almost fascinating to watch the movie unfold before you, it becomes entertaining to see what other failed experiments they managed to come up with, and in that sense they were pretty creative when making this movie.

The motorcycling on top of the train, the people being killed and then coming back later, the super-powerful biological weapon that looks like a couple test tubes full of Chem-light fluid, and the ridiculous villain all come together and make something that is morbidly fun to wonder about. I love how the villain is characterized, by the way. It's not enough that he has taken an entire train hostage and is trying to get his hands on a weapon of mass destruction, they have to really let us know how evil he is, so out of absolutely nowhere, he picks up a passenger's violin and curiously muses that it's a French model from around the 1800s and then smashes it on the table. Biological weapons are one thing, but a man who would casually smash a 200-year-old French violin? Oh, the humanity!!

Obviously, there have been a lot of comparisons to Under Siege 2, which also took place on a train, but mostly I think people make this comparison try to really get the point across about how bad this movie it. Yes, it's a bad movie, one of Van Damme's worst, but with the right frame of mind it is still enjoyable on some sad level. But if you can't thoroughly enjoy bad movies, you'll do well to avoid this one!