Stop! That! Train! is a very silly film – in the best possible way. It’s a disaster-action movie parody in the vein of The Naked Gun (1988), Hot Shots! (1991) and Airplane! (1980). In fact, Stop! That! Train!’s relationship to the latter is a little bit like a drag queen lip synching to their favourite diva’s famous belter: there’s space for interpretation, but the lyrics and the voice are pretty much set in stone.
Consequently, quite a few gags, not to mention the main narrative thrust of the plucky underdogs saving the day, are virtually lifted (with updates and variations) from Airplane! But as RuPaul Charles, the undisputed ruler of the Drag Race universe from which Stop! That! Train! has emerged, once wisely advised the Drag Race queens lip synching for the crown: “Good luck, and don’t fuck it up!”
Read more: RuPaul’s Drag Race: our research shows how it helps destigmatise the LGBTQ+ community
This very sensible piece of advice couldn’t ring truer for Tess and DeeDee (played by drag queens Ginger Minj and Jujubee), two spirited train stewardesses working for the decidedly downmarket Stank Rail. When the duo spots an opportunity to better themselves and wangle their way into the far more prestigious Glamazonian Express, they realise that they will need all the luck they can get.
Not only do they face a gaggle of snooty first class mean girl stewardesses, demanding passengers and hapless train conductors; they also come up against faulty brakes and an unprecedented weather event called Stormaganza. To tackle this smorgasbord of challenges, they team up with the country’s commander-in-chief – President Gagwell, played by RuPaul.
Stop! That! Train! is a lot of fun – so long as you’re someone who doesn’t take yourself too seriously. Minj and Jujubee are both Drag Race veterans. Their performances are gloriously camp, ridiculous, over the top and very watchable. The film also sports a head-spinning number of celebrity cameos and bit parts. This includes Sarah Michelle Gellar, living in constant expectation and hope of being recognised and The Real Housewives’ Lisa Rina, who is billed, rather splendidly, as “Sceney Celebrity”.
Given all this, you could be forgiven for thinking that Stop! That! Train!, among all its high jinks, may offer a robust critique of celebrity culture. And, to an extent, it does. But it is surface deep; definitely shallower than the layers of a drag queen’s make-up.
The limits of pastiche
Pastiche and parody are hard to do well. And it can also be hard to know what you can reasonably expect from them. On the one hand, the very nature of the spoof genre (and its reliance on exaggeration, ridiculousness and snubbing realism) prevents the viewer from caring about the characters too much. On the other, it allows comic artistry to expose the constructed, mawkish and cheaply sentimental nature of caring encouraged by the very genre that’s being parodied.
While Stop! That! Train! feels sanitised for mainstream audiences, it does have moments of real, bawdy edge and darkness that would probably not pass muster (or the morality test) in a “straighter” or more serious context. The merciless and sustained mockery of straightness, encapsulated in the hunky himbo of a co-conductor, Cal (played by the excellent Brian Jordan Alvarez), is particularly funny. It feels like a fitting payback for the numerous caricatures of non-straight characters in mainstream films.
Perhaps it’s an unrealistic expectation, but I wanted more paybacks and more subversion. Good queer, camp humour – and good drag, too – can take stereotypes and rigid social norms used to marginalise queer people and exaggerate or appropriate them, turning them into tools for mocking and challenging those norms.
If, as the American critic Susan Sontag claimed, camp is all about “artifice and exaggeration”, it is also – especially in recent years – about fighting back. This feels particularly important now, when attacks on drag performers have reached new heights. Drag, it has been argued by researcher Ella Greenhalgh, has become a force of queer resistance.
This resistance is not very visible in the largely depoliticised Stop! That! Train!, any more than it is visible in RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Maybe that’s too much to ask. After all, the same expectation of social commentary is relatively rarely placed on actual disaster-action movies (although some, such as 2021’s Don’t Look Up, have done a pretty good job in engaging with wider issues). But the current trend of revisiting the parodies of the 1980s — which includes the recently revived The Naked Gun (2025) — feels like an opportunity to update them. And giving them some teeth wouldn’t be the worst way to drag them (not necessarily kicking and screaming) into the 21st century.
Comments are closed.