The Railroad Men

I’d seen trailers for this film, but really couldn’t tell you what I was getting into. The Railroad men tells the apparently true story of Eric Lomax, played by Colin Firth, who was captured by enemy forces in the Pacific theatre during World War II and enslaved to build their railroad. The story follows the mans desires for revenge, intertwined with flashbacks to show exactly what happened to him during his incarceration. 

The movie starts off slowly, taking its time to let us meet this man as his wife met him, and see him as a soft spoken but intelligent and witty man, before we see hints of his madness and unfortunate past. The desire to know his story grows with his wife, quickly becoming a story we wish we hadn’t heard. It’s sad, brutal, and emotional to say the least.

And yet I couldn’t help feeling a bit let down by the script. This is the rare example of a script to me where a lackluster string of dialogue could be saved by absolutely dynamite acting between Firth and his wife played by Nicole Kidman. An equally brilliant performance must be given to Takashi Nagase, played by Hiroyuki Sanada and Tanroh Ishida in his younger days. But even with such amazing performances, the obvious morals and point of the script rang through a bit too soon. I was hoping to see more of a struggle, more pain and more reluctance. But even with all of its pain in the beginning, it felt like a sudden ending, too close to the ends of movies we see every day in a story that is as distant from these films as you can really get. 

Even so, there’s no way I can say I didn’t enjoy The Railroad Men. It’s perfect sense of brutality lead to an experience that perhaps even the very faint of heart could enjoy, without ever finding itself forcing blood to fill the screen. It was an interesting balance, and a risky one considering the source material. It paid off, letting us experience a film that even people like my mother, a person who finds herself disturbed and tired of constant violence, can see the beauty and darkness in without putting themselves through more than they can handle.

This film is a beautiful one, filled with richly performed characters and quite a story to take home with you, to tell the people around you who may be going through problems of their own. I just wish the script could have matched it in its brilliant performances and WWII camp sequences. But even so, I have to highly recommend it.

Rank - 3.5/5