The category is Pride Month in “Stop! That! Train!” And there’s a hot mess on the horizon as passengers on the Glamazonian Express are forced to dodge the divine retribution manifested in “stormaganza,” a giant storm that is quickly approaching this high-speed train. The movie’s “based on a true story” tagline doesn’t feel quite like the joke it sets out to be: being a passenger on a ride, run by idiots, that persists in trying to ruin us? Yeah, we’re all on that train.
So you can’t blame the bosom-bumping buddies Tess and DeeDee (the drag queens Ginger Minj and Jujubee, stars of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and born for the roles) for desperately wanting jobs on the luxury rail line where they become stewards after Stank Rail shuts down. Barbed exchanges between the new girls and the established Glamazonian crew of Alli (Marcia Marcia Marcia), Amber (Brooke Lynn Hytes) and Ayshleiygh (Symone) sting more than a little, but they’re no match for the crisis ahead.
What they need is a leader they can count on. What they get is President Judy Gagwell. No one even needs to utter the word “Trump” for him to be present in RuPaul’s coded, spectacle-scale performance of a president in name only, especially when tragedy strikes. President Gagwell is a figure marked by past controversy and grave incompetence, brought to the surface through recurring “hot flashbacks.”
Matt Rogers, her media-scolding press secretary, performs some terrific drag himself without dressing like Karoline Leavitt. There’s even a tough employment climate, as Latrice Royale’s Barbra knows, appearing in a new job in each scene as if by magic. It’s one of the greatest recurring punchlines in modern comedy. And Donna Dusk, the command center worker, is played by Rachel Bloom with the sort of seriousness that makes every stupid thing happening around her even funnier.
The comedy-cloaked defiance happening here turns the wrath of God on its head. If “stormaganza” is supposedly heavenly retribution, this movie’s response is to hand the rescue mission to drag queens and then dare you not to root for them. The cleverly absurd script by Christina Friel and Connor Wright does the film lots of favors, with the jokes arriving quicker than the gals get Glamazonian-ready in a public bathroom. With the same kind of sweetness and heightened stylization that he brought to “Hairspray,” the director Adam Shankman balances jokes for an in-crowd with the pleasures of spoofs like “Airplane!” and “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” plus the appeal of seeing Joel McHale in a harness (one of the better star cameos, which also include Sarah Michelle Gellar and Charo).
“Tell it to us straight; tell it to us gay,” various characters say throughout the film when danger arises. It’s an astutely funny bit about today’s media era, how each of us consumes a different algorithmically curated version of our own fraught world. “Stop! That! Train!” tells it to you in the most thoroughly, brazenly and exuberantly gay way, as though to say, this is the train many of us will want to be riding if it must go off the rails.
Stop! That! Train! Rated R for sexual innuendo and violent doors. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters.
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