Camellia Peebles
Here is the fastest way to know whether Stop! That! Train! is for you. Picture Airplane! Now picture it crewed almost entirely by RuPaul’s Drag Race alumni, shot on a budget that proudly shows its seams, and stuffed so full of jokes that the few seconds between them feel like a held breath. If that sentence made you grin, buy a ticket. If it made you tired, this train leaves in ten, and it will not be sad about it.
Adam Shankman’s disaster-comedy spoof is exactly what it announces itself to be. Best friends and stewardesses Tess (Ginger Minj) and DeeDee (Jujubee) trade their grim shifts on the Stank Rail for the glitzy Glamazonian Express, just in time for a catastrophic weather event called the Stormaganza to send the whole high-speed mess hurtling toward certain death. President Gagwell (RuPaul) presides over the chaos from a control room, threatening to nuke Russia as a recurring bit. That is the plot. The plot is not the point.
The point is the density. This is a film built squarely in the ZAZ tradition, the lineage of Airplane!, The Naked Gun, and Top Secret!, where David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker taught a generation that the way to make a spoof is to throw so many gags at the wall that the misses get buried under the hits before anyone can count them. The genre lives or dies on velocity—on never giving you a second to register the dud before the next bit arrives. Stop! That! Train! commits to that math completely.
A service scorpion escapes and stings the conductor. Nicole Richie travels with her dead grandmother in a coffin as her carry-on. The safety demonstration becomes a fun campy music number in red glitter, the queens instructing everyone to “sit the fuck down.” RuPaul’s assistant panics, accidentally hitting the (nuke-Russia) button, then immediately hits the button marked (JK. LOL) with a sigh of relief. When the gags land, and they land often, the theater laughs the way you only laugh at things this proudly, gloriously committed to their own absurdity. It is exactly the kind of film that underperforms on opening weekend and then plays at midnight to packed, screaming houses for the next twenty years, a queer cult classic in the making if it finds its people.
The standout, and the film’s actual engine, is Rachel Bloom as Donna Dusk, the lone competent woman in a control room full of people goofing off. Donna is the only character taking any of this seriously, which means she is the only one actually moving the plot forward, and the film mines real comedy from the gap between her diligence and everyone else’s indifference. The office parties around her. She advances the story single-handed, and nobody takes her seriously. It is the sharpest running joke in the movie because it is also the truest, and Bloom plays it with exactly the right exhausted conviction. When the plot moves, it is almost always because Donna shoved it.
The costumes are a genuine pleasure and deserve their own mention, because in a drag film like Stop! That! Train!, the looks are not decoration; they are text. The standout is RuPaul’s Rail Force getup in the finale, camouflage bedazzled with rainbow, military cosplay filtered through pure camp. It is the kind of design that tells you the people behind the camera understood the assignment even on the days the script may not have.
It also matters when this train pulls into the station. Stop! That! Train! arrived in the middle of Pride Month, and it is impossible to watch it outside that context. Director Adam Shankman, three decades into a career that includes Hairspray, has said this is the only film he has ever made with queer people as its leads, and he framed its release against a political moment in which hundreds of bills are moving through American legislatures aimed squarely at LGBTQ rights. In that light, the relentless silliness reads as a position. The film is not interested in proving queer stories matter by making them solemn. It insists instead that joy is just as valid a form of representation, and that a theater full of people screaming with laughter at drag queens saving a runaway train is its own kind of defiance. The lightness is the argument. Refusing to be solemn about your own existence, during a season when that existence is treated as a political football, is not a small thing.
That does not mean the script of Stop! That! Train! always stays on the rails. The film’s defining quality, its relentless meta-awareness, is also its defining liability. Sometimes the winking works, like when RuPaul glances at a random painting hanging in the train and asks, with perfect timing, “What the hell is that even doing here?!” And sometimes it curdles, the movie nudging you in the ribs about its own jokes until the nudging becomes the joke and the joke stops being funny. A late reveal, Tess and DeeDee are exposed as having once worked on the Stank Rail, lands with a thud, because who could possibly care about workplace hierarchy when everyone on screen is about to die? The melodrama is funny in spurts and inert in stretches.
While the runtime is a tidy 90 minutes, it does not always feel that way. Stop! That Train! occasionally mistakes more for better, piling on so much that the momentum sputters. The haunted-tunnel sequence is a particular missed chance, a cute stewardess number where the movie clearly could have done something with the ghosts and simply chose not to. There is a Titanic gag, violins and all, when the train somehow ends up underwater. There is a conductor presumed dead and bedded anyway, Cal, who is alive, turns out to have merely broken every bone in his body. There is even a mythic, “Dolly Parton’s Rocky Mountain Labyrinth,” referenced as if we were all there. If only…
None of this is an accident, and none of it is trying to be more than it is. Stop! That! Train! is the cinematic equivalent of a group of brilliant, funny friends doing bits until three in the morning, and your enjoyment depends entirely on whether you want to be in that room. The cameos alone, a parade that includes Joel McHale, Jerry O’Connell, Lisa Rinna, and a Sarah Michelle Gellar cameo that, criminally, nobody in the movie seems to clock as Buffy, signal who this is for. It is a film made by and for a specific community, in a specific dialect, with a specific sense of humor, and it does not stop to translate itself for anyone standing outside.
If you are fluent in drag culture and you love Airplane!, Stop! That! Train! is for you. If you are not, you will spend ninety minutes wondering why everyone around you is screaming with laughter. Both reactions are correct. The train was never going to stop for either of us. So climb aboard, hold on tight, and whatever you do…”don’t fuck it up.”
