Stop! That! Train!

Third-rate writing. Dreary energy. The sort of thing that sits there, politely, waiting for someone to pretend it’s a riot.

Until RuPaul walks in.

Then it kind of sparkles for a bit.

And then it doesn’t.

Stop! That! Train! wants to be Airplane! in a wig. Disaster-movie beats, stewardesses with attitude, a president who is not so much leading the country as hosting it. Ginger Minj and Jujubee do the heavy lifting as Tess and DeeDee, two pals who swap the grimy Stank Rail for the Glamazonian Express and immediately find themselves in a “stormaganza” heading for Los Angeles. The first-class queens sneer. The cameos pile up. The puns arrive on schedule. The whole thing is billed, with a wink so exhausted it can barely keep its eye open, as a true story that happened exactly like this.

It didn’t. And it doesn’t land.

The writing is the problem. Not the camp. The writing. Jokes announced rather than sprung. Set-ups that hang about like last night’s glitter. Sequences that feel workshopped by committee and then sanded down until nothing rude or surprising remains. You sit there waiting for the film to go properly off the rails. It never quite does. It just chugs.

Then RuPaul appears as President Judy Gagwell [again] and, for a few minutes, the air changes. Timing. Presence. That old, slightly dangerous sparkle. The room remembers what drag used to be able to do when it wasn’t so busy congratulating itself. And then the film goes back to being the film.

Think about the original Airplane!. How madly inappropriate it is now, when it wasn’t then. The jokes that would never get past a sensitivity reader. The throwaway cruelty. The assumption that an audience could take a punch and still laugh. That film is a time capsule of a different permission.

This one is the opposite. Inappropriate now and forever more… because the drag has become this ‘woke’ and unfunny. Everything is framed, explained, cushioned. Celebration instead of mischief. Inclusion instead of bite. The queens are here, the references are here, the heart is here… and the laughs keep missing their stop.

Perhaps we must address the ‘drag overload’ issue. When every other production is a reunion, a cameo, a branded extension of the same franchise energy, the sparkle starts to look like product. Drag used to be the thing that walked in and made the room dangerous. Here it walks in already approved.

There was one funny moment. When he threw himself out of the train. A proper, stupid, physical gag. No lecture attached. No lesson. Just a body leaving the carriage because the scene finally remembered it was supposed to be a comedy.

The rest is competent, colourful, and curiously tired. Shankman keeps it moving. The ensemble is game. Minj and Jujubee have real rapport. None of that is the same as being funny.

A film that wants to be Airplane! but has forgotten that Airplane! was allowed to be awful.

Now… and forever more.

Trailer...