A poorly scripted movie and waste of time and money. It is puzzling that the movie got made given the over-boiled melodramatic elements and the plot twists that were predictable. The movie demonstrated some potential when the story was set in China and there was the effort involved in rounding up the people willing to immigrant to work on the railroad. When the story moved to the BC interior and the challenges surrounding the construction of the railroad it seems that every exhausted trick is hauled out of the bag to propel the story to its fitful end. Very little effort to generate any originality in favour of moving things along with sudden plot-turning health crises, hidden and discovered identities and comic-book caliber villains. In the end, justifying the whole exercise with its historic reference to the plight of the Chinese who worked on the CPR is a more of a cop-out for bad movie-making than it is a tribute to the victims of the unsafe working conditions they encountered and the head tax that was laid on them after they finished the work. A step backward for Canadian movie-making that resembles the tax shelter garbage that occurred in the 1970s and 80s.
Review of Iron Road
