I’ve enjoyed Brad Anderson’s previous work–the sci-fi rom-com Happy Accidents stars Vincent D’Onofrio & Marisa Tomei as love interests and The Machinist stars an anorexic, neurotic Batman; both are excellent films.  His latest, Transsiberian, is a thriller that follows an American couple as they travel from China to Moscow and meet some shady people on the way.

Woody Harrelson & Emily Mortimer star as Roy & Jessie–a married couple who seem to prove that opposites attract.  Roy is an outgoing, optimistic hardware store owner who likes to drink, hates cigarettes and wants a family; Jessie is an introverted, insecure photographer who loves to smoke, avoids alcohol and believes “No glove, no love.”  After visiting China with their church to help some impoverished kids, they decide to take the train back to Moscow in an effort to add some excitement to their marriage.  Unfortunately, they get more than they hope for.

The film opens with Grinko (Sir Ben Kingsley), a Russian narcotics detective with a keen eye, investigating an odd drug-related killing.  A supposed drug runner sits dead at a table, halfway through finishing his dinner–fork still in his hand and knife deep in his head.  While looking around, Grinko notices little details around the crime scene completely missed by the other detectives (In Soviet Russia, crime scene investigate you!).  He eventually palms the dead guy’s cell phone before leaving the story for almost an hour.

As Roy & Jessie begin their journey across Asia, they realize the Trans-Siberian line isn’t as glamorous as they thought.  Police dogs frequently rummage through the train sniffing for drug mules and one passenger tells a story about Russian toe-cutting tactics in dealing with people with incorrect traveling papers (before limping away).  Their sleeper car has a radio stuck in the ON position and is soon filled with another couple who seem dark and mysterious.

Charming Spaniard Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) and his Seattle runaway girlfriend Abby (Kate Mara) travel the world and have the beaten-up passports to prove it.  The two couples share some tension, but eventually vodka is had by most and they open up to one another.  At one stop, the girls tell each other of their dark pasts and the guys go off to look at some defunct Soviet trains.  When the train departs on the next leg of its journey, Jessie can’t find Roy anywhere and Carlos claims they parted ways before reboarding.

Here’s where the red herrings start to fly.  Anderson was already setting up this new couple as a couple of baddies–from their hot and heavy introduction while Jessie “slept,” to the music cues every time Abby says nothing aloud but speaks volumes with her heavily-mascarad eyes.  He strings the audience along, makes you think you know where the story is going, and then pulls the rug out from under you.  He does this repeatedly which makes any more plot description pretty difficult without divulging too much.  All I can say is we get a couple of murders, a torture scene that might have been taken from Hostel’s cutting room floor, more heroin than Trainspotting and Traffic combined, and a plot that could have been solved much easier had someone decided to simply tell the truth.

The film does explore what can make a relationship work (and what can make it fail) along with the trouble you can get into by lying.  As Grinko says, “You can always go forward with a lie, but you can never go back.”  We can all relate to the idea that sometimes you have to lie to protect yourself–and the film does a fine job the first time the truth isn’t told.  It is completely believable that the liar felt they had to keep the truth hidden–after all, who could they trust?  But as the story progresses, the lies become more and more convoluted to the point where it doesn’t make any sense to continue the deception.

And then the lies go even further.

The movie’s resolution is dependent on the lying–had the truth been told from the start the bad guys would have gone unpunished–but was all the pain and suffering really worth it?  Maybe Anderson believes it was, but does he have to treat the audience as a bunch of ignoramuses?  His use of flashback borders on ridiculous–scenes we watched 15 minutes earlier are reshown with no new information given.  Sometimes flashbacks can be shown in a Rashomon style, revealing a different point of view to help the viewer better understand the characters’ motivations.  Anderson, at times, seemed to reloop the exact same footage just to make certain we know how important this piece of the plot is.  If he would have trusted me to make these connections myself (they really aren’t that hard to deduce) I may have been able to believe the unbelievable climax and silly denouement a little more.

Unfortunately, he didn’t and I couldn’t.