Money Train (1995)

Money Train arrives from 1995 with the confidence of a film that studied the buddy cop template and decided the study was sufficient. Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, fresh from White Men Can't Jump, are pressed into service as foster brothers and decoy transit officers patrolling the New York subway. Joseph Ruben directs with a workman's efficiency. The screenplay concerns a gambling debt, a mobster named Mr. Brown, and a plan to rob the armored train hauling the system's fare revenue. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert put it on their worst-of-the-year lists. They were not wrong, though the film has since acquired a modest cult following among people who enjoy the sound of screeching metal.

On the matter of social consciousness, the picture is nearly inert. Snipes and Harrelson play brothers across racial lines, and the casting of Jennifer Lopez as a capable decoy officer gives the ensemble a demographic breadth unusual for its era, yet the film never pauses to consider any of it. Grace Santiago fights, works stings, and ultimately arrests the abusive Captain Patterson, but she is also the romantic reward in a story owned by two men. Race is present as a fact of casting and absent as a subject. There is no queer presence, no environmental concern, no body politics, no attention to neurodivergence, and no historical argument of any kind. The theft at the center is motivated by personal debt, not by grievance against wealth. The film lectures no one, which is arguably its only restraint.

The Torch subplot, in which a villain douses a token booth attendant with gasoline, inspired several copycat crimes and a brief national outcry. Chris Cooper has said he regrets taking the role. That is the closest the film comes to a moral position, and it arrived by accident. What remains is a loud, competent, aimless thing, agreeable enough if we are in the mood for sparks and shouting, and empty of anything we might mistake for a message.