James Ryan

Occupation

Filmmaker

Shuttle Review

By Jay Antani

Terrible

One has to wonder if it ever occurred to writer-director Edward Anderson while making his thriller Shuttle how truly vile and reprehensible his project was. The hook, I'll admit, is pretty nifty: Two attractive young women, taking a shuttle van home from the airport find themselves terrorized by their psycho-driver. It fits neatly into the slasher-movie mold and, as a fan of the genre, I was intrigued by what twists and turns Anderson might throw at us. But as the true premise of his story unfolds, and we realize the reason for Shuttle's 106 minutes of torture and commotion, the whole enterprise collapses into the pile of stinking turpitude it actually is.The women in question, Mel (Peyton List) and Jules (Cameron Goodman) have just returned from a Caribbean holiday. It's dark, and they're getting drenched in a downpour. So, they take a van driver's (Tony Curran) offer to provide cheap rides home from the airport. There are only three other passengers -- Seth (James Snyder), a shaggy-haired horn dog, Matt (Dave Power), his sensible, chilled-out companion, and Andy (Cullen Douglas), a nervous milquetoast. No sooner have they set out that the driver, who's gruff and bullying without quite being menacing -- a common trap that sub-par thrillers often fall into - "gets lost" in a desolate stretch of the city, pulls out a gun, demands cash from his passengers, and begins his reign of terror.

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