Americans meet strangers on a train. In this Russo-phobic thriller, Roy (Woody Harrelson) and Jessie (Emily Mortimer) are two do-gooders from a church group who head home to Iowa. Their itinerary will include unwelcome overtures to sample local color. Heroin and torture, not to mention a boiled potato and a snowy orthodox monastery, are part of their Beijing-to-Moscow ride. First Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) and Abby (Kate Mara) invite themselves into the couple’s train compartment. These seasoned travelers claim they were teaching English in Japan. Then corrupt narc Ilya (Ben Kingsley) befriends the Iowans, now of questionable innocence. Director Brad Anderson (“Next Stop Wonderland” and “The Machinist”) and his co-writer Will Conroy are far from innocent of charges of bait and tease. After their bogus threats go poof, the plot kicks in real ones. “We have no shoes; they have guns,” Jessie notes sensibly when stranded on a subarctic steppe. Fortunately, Roy the hardware store proprietor knows all about cheaply made Chinese locks, and this choo-choo buff can engineer a locomotive if the occasion comes along, and it does. What’s more obnoxious: the Trans-Siberian train’s non-stop late-sixties Muzak, or the script’s endless variants of “In Russia, we have an expression for this”? With Thomas Kretschmann, Etienne Chicot, Mac McDonald and Colin Stinton. 111m. (Bill Stamets)
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