How to stop a train heading at full speed towards Los Angeles? In the universe of Stop! That! Train!the question ultimately matters less than the pleasure of multiplying absurd detours before the collision.
Directed by Adam Shankman, this queer disaster film stars RuPaul alongside an impressive cohort of stars from the world of RuPaul’s Drag RaceÂ: Ginger Minj, Jujubee, Brooke Lynn Hytes, Symone, Monét X Change and many others. Added to this are appearances by Sarah Michelle Gellar, Nicole Richie, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Joel McHale. Rarely have we seen such an openly queer cast take center stage in a mainstream Hollywood production.
Two railway flight attendants swap their gloomy daily lives for the “Glamazonian Express”, a luxurious train presented as a glittering utopia where everyone can finally become the best version of themselves. But when a weather disaster threatens to derail the convoy, passengers and crew members will have to come together to avoid the worst.
An assumed aesthetic of falsehood
From the opening scene, Shankman announces his colors. The film borrows from disaster comedies, Hollywood films of the 1950s, railway melodramas, cartoons and the big jokes Airplane!. The settings seem deliberately artificial. The costumes burst with pink, sequins and shiny fabrics. The characters evolve in a universe that resembles less the real world than a giant doll’s house.
This artificiality constitutes both the main quality and the main limitation of the film. Everything is caricatured: the power games, the dynamics of seduction, the political conflicts. RuPaul thus portrays a tyrannical, narcissistic and deliciously ridiculous President of the United States. Here, no one is looking for realism. Nor the plausibility.
When the film works, this parodic logic produces some frankly successful comic flashes. Certain characters become walking caricatures of contemporary failings: the privileged rich woman incapable of looking beyond her (reconstructed) navel, the incompetent men obsessed with sex, the grotesque authority figures. The film sometimes reveals, with a certain ferocity, the worst of human beings.
Camp until exhaustion
The problem is that this strategy ends up backfiring. By accumulating salacious gags, winks at drag culture and deliberately histrionic performances, the story quickly loses its dramatic propulsion. We laugh a few times, but we struggle to become attached to the characters or to really worry about their fate. The humor, very niche, relies largely on the codes of contemporary queer culture and the Drag Race universe. Fans will no doubt find it a fun playground. Others risk staying behind.
Finally, it should be noted that the film recently found itself at the heart of a controversy surrounding the alleged use of artificial intelligence (AI) in visual effects. Some spectators considered the effects so artificial that they believed them to be generated by AI. The director categorically denied these accusations, affirming that “no shot of the film had been designed by artificial intelligence”. In any case, we are forced to admit that several visual effects are quite poor in fact, it is difficult to distinguish the deliberately artificial aesthetic of the film from clumsiness…;
Object deeply camp, Stop! That! Train! possesses the audacity of its eccentricity and the singularity of its distribution. We can welcome this rare visibility granted to drag and queer artists. But behind its sparkling appearance, this spectacular train ultimately carries few things.
