Film Review: The Midnight Meat Train (2008)
Promising Plot Gets on a Train to Nowhere…Fast
Mar 24, 2009
The element of a surprise ending is a difficult one to pull off, and often times, it can be more effective in written form than on film – there is much more space for description and explanation which, if carried out well, will not seem like an info-dump, but like a shocking twist in the plot. Hopefully this is the case for Clive Barker’s short story, “The Midnight Meat Train,” because in its film incarnation, adapted by Jeff Buhler, it doesn’t work very well.
The Midnight Meat Train’s Intriguing Premise
The film starts out well enough – Leon (played by Bradley Cooper) is a photographer trying to find his big break with his supportive girlfriend, Maya (Leslie Bibb), at his side. The focus of his photography is the city – New York City – and although he’s obviously talented, he’s not quite capturing its essence. Photography bigwig Susan Hoff (Brooke Shields) takes one look at Leon’s work and tells him to go for the real grit.
Lucky for Leon, he quickly happens upon grit, and a whole lot of it. Everything begins to spiral when he saves a girl from an attack in a subway station. She thanks him, steps onto the 2:06 a.m. train, and is never seen again. Before long, Leon realizes that people seem to be going missing from this one train in particular, and that there’s a man in a suit (Vinnie Jones) riding it every night.
Leon’s Obsession with Mahogany Grows
This man is called Mahogany, and he’s quite brilliantly portrayed by Vinnie Jones as a clinical, speechless, yet cold-blooded killer. Over time, Leon becomes so fixated on Mahogany that he follows him through his day-to-day life, finds out where he lives, works, and so on. It turns out he’s a butcher (so that’s where he gets his skills), and he certainly does not like being pursued by Leon.
Plot Twists, Thickens, and Pressure Escalates Inexplicably
Things start to get fuzzy at this point. Maya is irrationally opposed to Leon having anything to do with Mahogany and Leon is suddenly a very different, very angry man. He starts to demonstrate violent behaviour and stops talking as much as he used to. In a desperate attempt to prove to police and to herself that her boyfriend is not crazy, Maya decides to get onto the 2:06 a.m. train, and of course, Leon ends up going for the ride to save her.
But just when you think that you’ll finally get some sort of rational explanation as to why Mahogany is constantly butchering people, and why the train conductor (Tony Curran) would go along with such heinous crimes, you get thrown for a loop. Unfortunately, rather than becoming an exciting plot twist, the solution offered presents so many problems that it discredits the whole first half of the film. What was a murder mystery has turned monster movie, and the two storylines just don’t fit together.
Extreme Gore Throughout The Midnight Meat Train
If they couldn’t successfully deliver a well-written story, the makers of The Midnight Meat Train certainly deliver one of the goriest horror movies ever made. The bloodshed is comedic at times, spurting a la Kill Bill in copious amounts, but at other times it’s so intense and excessive that it could make even an extreme horror fan queasy. It’s not a film to watch over dinner, that’s for sure.
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