The 15:17 to Paris is a drama thriller film directed by Clint Eastwood. Based on the real life Amsterdam to Paris train attack of 2015, it pays a nice amount of respect to the actual heroes involved but does not translate on screen as well as it could have.After backpacking across Europe for an extended period of time, childhood friends Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, and Alek Skarlatos (all played by themselves) decide to finish their vacation by catching the 15:17 train from Amsterdam to Paris. While onboard the train, the three friends spot a terrorist attempting to attack the passengers with an assault rifle. Putting their military knowledge to the test, the three of them leap to the aid of the passengers in an attempt to subdue the gunman.There's no denying the film's good intentions but unfortunately, most of them fall flat. The decision to cast the three real life heroic individuals as themselves was an interesting experiment that clearly did not work out and ended up working to the film's disadvantage. While none of the three were terrible by any means, neither of them have any acting charisma or screen presence to hold one's attention during the film's important expositional scenes. In addition to this, the actual event only took place in a matter of minutes, so there are often obvious scenes of padding to make the film longer. I feel that this story of heroism would have worked much better as a 45 minute made-for-TV docudrama rather than a feature length film.I rate it 5/10

I've watched tens of thousands of movies and TV for 50+ years. I know when the acting is bad, the writing is bad or when the different elements don't live up to a standard. When I came into this movie, I expected an action adventure drama cookie cutter film. What I saw was an above average fictionalized documentary style movie and it seemed too real in dialog. As things progressed, I saw a predictable storyline leading to what the film's title made you expect. (mediocre) The actors seemed to be exactly playing the parts they were given and the events seemed to play out the way reality plays out. (good) As the aftermath was playing, I had to know if it was a true story because it seemed so. Some of the film seemed like actual footage and it might actually have been in some cases. Then I saw Clint's involvement and was intrigued. I then watched his "making of" and realized what was done. I was so impressed with the handling of Clint's direction of real for acting not only for the main actors but what seemed to be background players, bystanders and victims that I have no idea who is an actor in the film and who is a real person. Obviously they can't film back in time, so there were actors for that, but who knows? Because of this reality factor, even bad acting can be forgivable. When you go to a bar and order a beer and flirt with the bartender, are you a bad actor? or a bad writer because of what you say? or a bad director because of what you intend? If you don't like this movie for any of a dozen reasons, I say you are a bad reviewer because you are a cynical witness. You weren't there at the real event, so you cannot be a critic to simulated real life. I've had real life events that felt like this. And I acted badly, but had no witnesses and didn't die.

This movie was horrendous, I couldn't even make it 30 minutes. Horrible acting and boring as hell. I respect the story and the men involved but it was awful

I'm not going to pull apart the acting of the three stars of this film. I think, given the dire construction of flawed contrived conversation they did alright. The film itself however was terrible. I think Mr Eastwood was quite keen to jump on the story of this, then when the task came to it of creating a background and a whole film of this event, the realisation that there isn't a film that can be made, the writers padded this event into a montage of wasted conversation. The childhood development part was fine, the military training was fine, all that was left was the incident, and about an hour to turn this into feature length, so we had a monotonous hour of three guys walking around the sights of Italy, going into bars and taking selfies that did nothing to develop the characters, plot or entertainment. The conversations were dire, falsified and barely could flow from the lips of the most professional of actors, let alone three guys in their first attempt...I actually think they did very well, sometimes a worksman can blame his tools. If anyone to blame it's Eastwood, and the dialogue writers.