Tony Scott’s ‘Unstoppable’ an adrenaline-filled ride

TONY SCOTT'S rousing "Unstoppable" is something unique in contemporary Hollywood - a big, glossy thriller about two men just trying to do their blue-collar jobs.

No jewel heist, no casino robbery, no albino hit-men, spies, transformers, terrorists, wizards, warlocks, werewolves or vampires.

The heroes are a pair of Pennsylvania railroad workers who are rolling along when word comes over the radio that up ahead, barreling toward them at high speed, is an unmanned locomotive pulling tanks of toxic chemicals. (The movie is very loosely based on a 2001 incident in Ohio.)

You could say the workers are two "regular" dudes, except that one of them is Denzel Washington, a huge asset to "Unstoppable" - he can inhabit this common-man role while retaining all the power and force of movie-star personality, and his gravity helps when the movie goes a little goofy, as Scott's movies tend to do.

He plays Frank Barnes, an engineer and old-timer saddled with a distracted, unqualified trainee named Will (Chris Pine), who starts paying attention when he realizes cranky old Frank means to stop the runaway train single-handedly.

Frank pulls off onto a spur, unhooks his load, waits for the rogue train to pass, then tears off after it in reverse, preparing for a high-speed boarding operation. Not because he wants to (Will certainly doesn't), but because he can, because it's his job, and because every other idea stinks.

Frank learns through his fast-talking dispatcher (Rosario Dawson) that his plan runs counter to the wishes of the railroad's corporate owners, who've hatched a scheme to derail the runaway train and its explosive, toxic load near a small town. Collateral damage? They've crunched the numbers. It's already a write-off.

Yes, "Unstoppable" lays on the heartless corporate big-shot thing a little thick, but we gotta say, rich and powerful decision-makers, you kind of have this coming.

If we think of the U.S. ship of state as a freight train, and a runaway one at that, I think we all know who's going to stop it, and it won't be anyone at HQ, or on Wall Street, or in Washington.

The job will fall to the kind of guys you meet in "Unstoppable." They didn't start the train rolling down the track, but they will bear the risk and sacrifice of stopping it.

Fox must think it's onto something, because it's started to play up this angle in its TV commercials (which you really shouldn't watch, since they reveal a fairly important third-act surprise).

If that sounds a little heavy, especially for action fans, fear not. The movie can be enjoyed strictly for kicks - the fun of seeing big-time Hollywood stars and craft deployed in the service of a story of lunch-pail people and lunch-pail places.

Scott, never one to underplay, rolls out his drone army of fixed and moving cameras, shooting Washington and Pine from a dozen angles, swirling around them with a couple of chopper cams.

He stitches all of this together to achieve his trademark feel of action-movie delirium, and from time to time flips a cop car, just for the hell of it. The movie isn't always completely logical, but it's completely Scott.

And what an inspired choice he turns out to be. Scott, a Yorkshireman before he became a Hollywood "Top Gun," turns out to have an affinity for the Rust Belt terrain of rural Pennsylvania. Rarely has our postindustrial back yard been so gorgeously photographed.

"Unstoppable" reminds us that our digital economy isn't all, or even mostly, virtual. Great tons of it runs on rails, over tracks and bridges and elevated spans that still carry megaton trains after a century of use, still retain a share of their engineering majesty.

I wonder if the Internet structures we so marvel at today will last as long.