Stop! That! Train! That title alone, with its emphatic trio of exclamation marks, gives you a pretty clear idea of what you’re about to experience: that everything following the opening credits will be steeped in camp melodrama. Also, that there’s a train, it’s out of control, and will need stopping in the daftest way possible. And that, to the relief of many a Drag Race fan, is exactly what you’ll get.
In RuPaul’s newest offering, BFFs Tess (Ginger Minj) and DeeDee (Jujubee), still nostalgic for their days at train hostess academy, find themselves abruptly sacked from their jobs at bargain-basement train line (the brilliantly named Stank Rail) before somehow managing to acquire new roles on the high-end luxury Glamazonian Express, a sleek, first-class (and bright pink) rail service bound for Florida. Picking up where John Waters left off, all the female leads are played by drag queens in a world where no one notices and certainly nobody cares. Onboard, they must contend with three Queen Bee hostesses (also drag queens Brooke Lynn Hytes, Marcia Marcia Marcia and Symone) channelling their best Regina Georges, a handsome-but-dim co-driver Cal (Brian Jordan Alvarez), and a coterie of deranged passengers. Then comes a warning from beleaguered air traffic controller Donna Dusk (Rachel Bloom): the train is heading into the path of a major weather event: “a Stormaganza!” Cue lots of panicking and OTT craziness as the train thunders towards disaster.
The celebrity cameos come thick and fast, but crucially, all of them feel earned and are genuinely funny. When Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie attempted the same thing though none of it landed: it all felt horribly shoehorned in at the expense of plot. (Look, Rylan’s an air hostess!) Here, director Adam Shankman gives his guest stars genuinely funny things to do – Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a businessman telling a heavily pregnant woman “Oh, I love children. In utero. Once they’re out – blergh” or Sarah Michelle Gellar playing herself, becoming increasingly desperate to convince passengers she’s the real SMG though none of them believes her. The film knows when to use them and allows them to be part of the story – the joke is never simply that a celebrity has turned up.
Naturally, the film owes a considerable debt to Airplane!, the 1980s kingpin of disaster parody movies. Its out-and-out silliness helped establish a comedic template eventually inherited by the Wayans brothers and their litany of spoof films that seemed to dominate the 2000s, for better or worse. Inserting drag queens into the mix seems like a logical next choice, since drag has always understood the comic possibilities of exaggeration and artifice.
Nobody understands this better than Mama Ru herself. RuPaul is easily the film’s greatest asset as President Judy Gagwell, drafted in to save the day while grappling with her own past trauma from her former career as a train driver, when she inadvertently struck a toddler who was doing what all toddlers apparently do: playing alone with a balloon on an active railway line. Her approval-rating scale is marked out by “She Fun!” at the top and “Lea Michele in 2020” at the bottom, and there’s increasing concern it’s starting to enter Lea Michele territory.
The Culturistas’ Matt Rogers is great as her assistant. The outtakes reel at the end reveals just how tough it would have been to keep a straight face acting opposite Ru, particularly in one scene where they walk West Wing-style round the Oval Office (literally in circles). In contrast, assistants pile the President’s arms high with important files, then random bric-a-brac, until Ru is just carting about an enormous pile of junk. But since Ru is the most watchable part of all this, it’s confusing that she isn’t introduced until the film’s midpoint. You understand it’s trying to build momentum, but it feels like a waste to spend far too much time establishing this vast ensemble without bringing in the show’s star.
For every moment that manages to slay the house down boots, others don’t make it out of the station. The songs aren’t catchy enough, with none of the floor-filling joy of Sissy That Walk. Films like this need to be endlessly quotable – people still reel off lines from Airplane! and Scary Movie to this day – but you can’t imagine the same being applied here, since although the jokes often land in the moment, they are never as memorable as those parody predecessors. There’s slapstick, but it’s underplayed – drag queens are, in essence, experts at this type of physical comedy, and admittedly, there’s probably not much space for them to really enact this type of humour on a set built to look like a railway carriage; you feel like there could have been room for more creative invention to let the queens cook.
But this is a film that, above anything, needs to be viewed entirely on its own terms. This is not a film with grand ambitions to illuminate the human condition. It wants you to laugh at drag queens screaming on a runaway pink train, and on those terms it largely succeeds. It will get conflicting reviews because audiences have to be in exactly the right frame of mind to enjoy it, but you can easily visualise it playing out on screens at gay bars during Pride, in Ku Bar or the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Watching this alone would never work the way it’s meant to; it’s best watched with a group on a Saturday night, ideally a few martinis deep. So, while it doesn’t quite fire on every cylinder, it does achieve what it sets out to do. Buckle in and surrender yourself to the silliness, and the film will offer you a gloriously camp journey in spades.
Continue Reading
Discover more reviews selected by the editors at The People’s Movies.
› Jackass: Best and Last Review
› Lady Review
› Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie Review
In UK cinemas on August 20th / RuPaul Charles, Ginger Minj, Jujubee, Rachel Bloom, Brooke Lynn Hytes, Marcia Marcia Marcia, Symone, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jesse Tyler Ferguson / Dir: Adam Shankman / Universal Pictures / 15
Discover more from
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
