"Everybody knocks out a flop every now and then," quipped Clint Eastwood during a recent interview to promote his latest movie, "The 15:17 to Paris."
The film forms part of an informal trilogy dedicated to real-life examples of American derring-do, following on from "Sully" (2016) and "American Sniper" (2014). Yet it's also the most experimental of the three, thanks to Eastwood's bold decision to re-create the 2015 Thalys train attack — in which a trio of U.S. backpackers foiled a terrorist gunman — using many of the actual protagonists.
Six decades into his career, the filmmaker probably has better things to worry about than the opinions of a few critics, but the response to the movie has been overwhelmingly negative. Though a few writers have rallied to its defense, it has been widely lambasted as "dramatically inert" (The Guardian), "defiantly amateurish" (Time Out) and "too muffled and often too dull to make an impact" (The New Yorker). The esteemed French periodical Cahiers du Cinema, normally one of the director's staunchest advocates, declared simply: "Eastwood's latest is a shipwreck."