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Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz The 87-year-old Clint Eastwood ("Jersey Boys"/"Gran Torino")
directs a true story hero thriller on three American buddies from Sacramento – Spencer
Stone (an Air Force Medic), Anthony Sadler (college student at Sacramento State) and Alek
Skarlatos (Oregon National Guardsman)– who were vacationing in Europe and while on the
high-speed 15:17 train from Brussels to Paris confronted the shirtless Ayoub El Khazzani
(Ray Corasani), a Moroccan-born terrorist, who just shot a passenger. He was armed with a
AK-47 assault rifle, a 9mm Luger pistol, a box cutter, a hammer, gasoline and a backpack
with enough ammunition to take out the train with 500+ passengers. Stone charged at him,
but his AK-47 jammed. The gunman still sliced the back of his neck with the box cutter. With
the help of Sadler and Skarlatos, who used the man's weapon to knock him unconscious, a
catastrophe was averted. French President Hollande awarded them the Legion of Honor.
President Obama called them and thanked them for their bravery. On their return to the
United States, they were given a heroes welcome. In a risky move, Eastwood cast the non-
actor Sacramento natives Spencer Stone , Anthony Sadler, and Alek Skarlatos as
themselves, which added an air of verisimilitude but the regular guys were just amateurs as
actors. The action-packed 10-minute heroic sequence was vintage filmmaking. However the
first-time screenwriter Dorothy Blyskal, in a lackluster way, fills out the story with other
episodes from the men's childhood and early adulthood, and depicts their sincere belief in
religion. For Watch The 15:17 to Paris 2018 who can't stomach the usual Hollywood way of
pumping up heroes, Clint's film serves as the anti-Hollywood film. He's got a helluva
newspaper headline story to work with. Unfortunately it lags when not telling of the event, as
it seems a bit too relaxed and overlong. Yet the film was worth seeing for the take down of
the terrorist by genuine heroes. The three heroes wrote the book with journalist Jeffrey E.
Stern. It highlights Eastwood's strengths and weaknesses as a director. His problem here is
of how to build a movie around an over-the-top incident that is so brief. He does so by telling
of the ordinary lads and their ordinary lives, which results in an ordinary film.