Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		2.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.5

Derailed Blu-ray Movie Review

Everybody twist.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 28, 2010

Is Jennifer Aniston cursed? Sure, sure, sure, she’s fabulously wealthy, incredibly beautiful and managed to be the “Debbie Reynolds” to Brad’s “Eddie Fisher” and Angelina’s “Elizabeth Taylor.” But while the post-Friends career and even personal universe hasn’t been exactly rosy for any of that hit sitcom’s stars, the bad luck seems to have hit Aniston particularly hard. Back when Aniston was a Top 10 television phenomenon, Jolie was merely that weird girl who carried a vial of Billy Bob’s blood around and who kissed her brother at the Oscars. Aniston even courted a bit of Oscar buzz herself with her turn in The Good Girl, and her first forays into film seemed to promise the sort of big screen success that regularly eludes ostensible superstars of the airwaves. But around the time her marriage to Pitt crumbled, Aniston ceased to be a surefire draw at the box office, and in fact she’s delivered one dud after another in the last few years. Even Aniston’s putative hits—films like Marley and Me and He’s Just Not That Into You—perhaps owed their success less to Aniston’s appeal than to built in audiences due to their prefabricated draws based on their source material. Jolie is of course now probably the biggest female name in American films, while perky little girl next door Aniston is probably wondering what she must have done to deserve all this relative misfortune. Sandwiched in between two of Aniston’s signature light comedy roles in Along Came Polly and Rumor Has It. . . came 2005’s Derailed, a sort of Brief Encounter meets Diabolique romantic thriller that posits Aniston as a woman caught up in an affair that has disastrous consequences. Of course as in any good thriller, nothing is really as it seems, but that’s part and parcel of Derailed’s problem. Anyone with half a brain (and that might be half a brain more than screenwriter Stuart Beattie, adapting James Siegel’s novel) is probably going to guess the eventual denouement of Derailed, or at the very least, one of the denouements, as this is a thriller that “keeps on giving”—endings, that is.

The basic setup of Derailed is promising, even intriguing, and in fits and starts throughout the film, it manages to deliver some decently disturbing moments. Advertising executive Charles Schine (Clive Owen) has a typically dysfunctional but relatively happy home life, including a very ill daughter. He misses his usual Chicago commuter train one day and in a filmic “meet cute” that is one of the film’s glaring logic flaws, comes into contact with Lucinda Harris (Aniston), an even higher-powered executive who pays his train fare for him when he discovers his wife has cleaned out his wallet. Charles and Lucinda soon are meeting for drinks and, in the kind of romantic shorthand that only ever takes place in movies, are soon contemplating the “next step,” which in an extremely unlikely move, posits them in one of the seediest hotel rooms imaginable. Suddenly a sociopath named LaRoche (Vincent Cassel) bursts into the room, assaults Charles and viciously rapes Lucinda.

Charles is now at the mercy of both his formidable guilt—for having cheated to begin with and for not having been able to protect Lucinda—and LaRoche’s increasingly aberrant demands for money. Derailed starts to rather pointedly go off the rails (poetic justice, one would guess) at this point, as screenwriter Beattie follows every demented stalker cliché out there, including having LaRoche show up at Charles’ suburban manse to make nice with Charles’ wife and daughter. Charles increasingly finds himself a pawn in a very distressing chess game, leading to him embezzling funds from his employer.

But of course in a film which starts with Charles helping his daughter with a school writing assignment and giving her verbiage to explain plot twists, all is not as it seems in Derailed. The problem is, things really are as they seem in Derailed, if you’ve ever seen a film with a putative “big twist,” and Derailed’s own take on “surprise” plot machinations isn’t particularly surprising. Without spoiling the supposed surprise for those of you who might not see it coming (get your eyes checked, is my advice), Derailed does manage to eke out a gasp or two just in terms of unexpected carnage at one of the climaxes, and then go on to a series of codas that make the “many endings” of the Lord of the Rings trilogy seem like a Reader’s Digest walk through the park.

By far the best thing about Derailed is the performance of Clive Owen. This “almost” James Bond reveals levels of vulnerability and outrage that same of his other film portrayals have only hinted at. His Charles is a dark and brooding character caught in a web that is of course partially of his own making, but which soon becomes so entangled in unimaginable strands of other people’s doings that the character has to confront his own suburban bred impotence to try to set things right again. And that at least explains one of the codas, which brings the film to a relatively satisfying conclusion.

But too much else in Derailed plays like a second rate dinner theater version of Hitchcock. The innocent (or in this case semi-innocent) man lured into a web of intrigue and deceit. Seen it. The pathological behavior of a coterie of bad people. Seen it. The hard boiled police detective who knows something bad’s cooking, but can’t quite put his finger on it. Definitely seen it. If Derailed had jettisoned at least some of these elements, it would have been a leaner, meaner thriller and might have provided Jennifer Aniston with an entrée into femmes fatales roles. As it stands, she’s still cute and perky, but that isn’t exactly what a film like Derailed calls for.

Derailed Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Derailed unfortunately suffers from one of the poorer Blu-ray transfers I've seen recently. Delivered via an AVC codec, in 1080p and a 2.34:1 aspect ratio, Derailed is hobbled by omnipresent digital noise that litters the frame like a horde of pesky gnats flying indiscriminately around. Add to this some fairly overwhelming grain and you have the makings of even ardent DNR-phobes begging for a little noise reduction. Colors are quite good, with excellent saturation and a nicely varied palette, and in brightly lit scenes, where noise and grain tend to be diminished to relatively bearable levels, a good degree of fine detail and sharpness emerge in the image. But overall this is a fairly shoddy looking Blu-ray that is certainly not going to set any fan's heart a-flutter with its hi-def clarity.

Derailed Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Derailed's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is a good deal better than its image quality, but that may be the backhanded compliment of the waning year. When the film erupts in gunfire or fisted violence, there's some great LFE and good immersion. But the bulk of this film is dialogue driven and as such there's simply not that much opportunity to exploit the surrounds. The sides and rears come into play in expected places, like crowded office scenes, a restaurant and a couple of very explosive action sequences. Otherwise things are anchored pretty steadily in the front channels, where everything is clear as a bell and easy to hear. Nothing extremely remarkable here, but certainly nothing major to complain about, either.

Derailed Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Derailed doesn't offer a whole lot in the supplements department:

• Deleted Scenes (1080i; 10:39) has some interesting additional storyline information, including some expanded detail about Charles' daughter's illness.
• Making of Derailed (1080i; 8:15) is yet another standard EPK-fest with behind the scenes footage and interviews.
• Theatrical Trailer

Derailed Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Derailed is its own worst enemy, and not just in its too apt title. There's too much here that has been done better elsewhere, and not even the charisma of Owen and Aniston can help overcome the déjà vu. With one of the poorer Blu-ray transfers in recent memory, this is one train you should let pass you by.