Derailed - R
Common Sense Note
Parents should know that the movie is premised on an adulterous affair. It includes frequent images of bloody violence: a shooting, several stabbings, fist fights, and the start of a rape. Characters smoke and drink, curse frequently (the f-word in various forms, "s--t," slang for genitals). Characters lie to each other incessantly, and the hero's triumph is based in a lie that he agrees to keep secret with the detective. References are made to a daughter's illness, with images as well of her injections and a difficult-breathing episode.
Families can talk about the persistent costs of cheating, the ugliness of lying and blackmailing. How do the villains embody threats to the suburban ideal? How does the commuter train/the city represent a site of temptation?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
DERAILED is an unimaginative, ridiculously plotted thriller about adultery. Charles (Clive Owen) and his wife Deanna (Melissa George) share a dispassionate partnership in the Chicago burbs, expending most of their emotional energy on looking after their sweet, diabetic, occasionally near-death daughter Amy (Addison Timlin). They're so focused on this noble cause that, as Amy notices, they don't even kiss when they leave for work in the morning.
Charles' derailment begins on the commuter train he takes to work, where he meets Lucinda (Jennifer Aniston). Though he knows better, Charles sets up a lunch, they lie to their spouses, and get in a cab. When at last they make their way a seedy joint where they get a room for $46, they're barely underway when a scary thug named LaRoche (Vincent Cassel) busts in their room with a gun. The villain goes through their wallets, chides Charles for cheating with this "fine piece of ass," then beats him bloody, and looks about to rape Lucinda as Charles goes unconscious.
Afterwards, Lucinda makes Charles promise not to tell the cops or his wife. And of course, he agrees, feeling guilty about the rape that went on during his unconsciousness. While all this business would constitute plot in another movie, here it's just set-up. Within hours, LaRoche calls with a blackmail demand. Soaking in his tub with his bruised face sad and murky, he agrees. When La Roche asks for still more money, Charles turns to the one thug he knows for help: the black guy.
This guy's name is Winston (RZA), and he delivers the mail in Charles' office. As he's an ex-con (with a 4.0 GPA in high school), he has an understanding of brutality that is, at least for now, quite beyond Charles' own. When Charles asks him what prison is like, Winston looks sage as only the RZA can: "Prison's like walking a tightrope," he says, then essentially admits that he killed a man to survive: "When your back's up to the wall, you gotta do what you gotta do." Charles agrees again, at least as far as he can comprehend the dire meaning of this assessment. What, exactly, does he gotta do?
What follows devolves even more feebly into silly-plotting. The scheme gone wrong leads to the introduction of a couple of other black guys, dogged and painfully named Detective Church (Giancarlo Esposito), who also happens to be related to Winston, and LaRoche's second, Dexter (Xzibit). Charles finds his inner thug after he's made what appears to be a series of profoundly wrong decisions. His sudden ingenuity and action heroics hardly make up for the rest of his bad judgment, or the film's ancient moralizing (i.e., adultery is bad).
Families who like thrillers might prefer Fatal Attraction, Unfaithful, or, for a slight change in theme and superior movie, Body Heat (1980).
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentSexual adultery; woman showering blurrily glimpsed through shower door; conversations about the adultery. |
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ViolenceBloody beat downs, stabbings, and a shooting. Sexual violence. |
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LanguageFrequent cursing (f-word, s-word, "ass"); sexual/genital and racist slang (f-word and n-word). |
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Social BehaviorBlackmail, adultery, and very angry, mean, and smug villains. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoDrinking in a bar, some smoking by villains. |
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