My quick rating – 3.8/10. Speed Train opens with what looks like a fake commercial for a glossy AI megacorp. And honestly, that might be the most believable part of the movie. From there, we’re thrown onto a high-tech train where passengers with brain implants are remotely controlled like human Xbox characters, each user supposedly paying ten million dollars a pop for the privilege. Ten million. And yet every single one of these elite players is sitting in the same weird black void using what looks like a free Zoom background you’d find under “Corporate Dystopia – Depressed Version.” If I’m paying that kind of money, I at least want a custom background or, I don’t know, a plant.
The players themselves are all boxed into this identical, featureless room, staring intensely into their VR headset and delivering line readings so wooden they could be repurposed as IKEA furniture. Their acting is genuinely rough, and somehow it manages to be rivaled by the CGI of the train itself, which looks like it was rendered on a laptop begging for mercy. I do get the limitations – no windows, because animating a moving exterior costs money. But what we’re left with is a train interior that looks like two rows of office chairs shoved along a wide hallway. It’s less “futuristic transport” and more “corporate team-building exercise gone wrong.”
Of the cast, I recognized Scout Taylor-Compton and Nicky Whelan, both established actresses who never quite hit the mainstream. Most of the female characters are stuck in tight white tank tops and thrown into brawls, which, frankly, might be the only thing the movie seems to get right. The action is okay-ish, the idea is solid, but the execution torpedoes it at every stop.
The idea is actually interesting on paper. Everyone must band together when a hacker gets into the system and ruins this luxury murder train with chaos. The problem is logic. The users are controlling inmates, not downloading skills or muscle memory. Yet we’re supposed to believe a random kid at a laptop can suddenly throw crisp punches and kicks through a hardened convict. It’s dysfunctional, and the only part of the movie I found myself laughing at. And repeatedly, the film cuts constantly to randoms at computers, contributing NOTHING to the action. They’re simply present. Pecking at the keyboard. Hard.
Ryan Francis directs with a frenzied, chaotic energy that mostly translates to confusion. The screenplay makes absolutely no sense once you scratch the surface. Even basic rules of the world seem to change scene to scene. There are plenty of fights, a decent amount of blood-splattering gore, and nothing is outright embarrassing. But nothing is cool either. It’s all aggressively fine.
Speed Train couldn’t be considered anything other than a B-movie. It has all the qualities that one would expect to find in one. A good premise that could have added some fun and entertainment is instead rendered nonsense because of poor visual effects and plot development that seems to have been written by the same person who seems to be operating the train.
