The seemingly endless expansion of the Drag Race IP and its showification of drag itself might make Stop! That! Train, directed by Adam Shankman and written by Connor Wright and Christina Friel, easy to dismiss as brand extension. It’s not not that—catchphrases from and references to Drag Race abound—but this daffy disaster comedy, which suggests Airplane! by way of Sharknado, is fueled by a winning unseriousness.
It helps that Ginger Minj and Jujubee—as Tess and Deedee, two recently laid-off Stank Rail hostesses who join the ranks of the Glamazonian Express—are comedy queens who can land a joke. They’re charmingly unglamorous compared to Glamazonian hostesses and mean girls Amber (Brooke Lynn Hytes), Ayshleiygh (Symone), and Ali (Marty Lauter, a.k.a. Marcia Marcia Marcia), who walk down the aisle of the Glamazonian Express with stiletto-sharp precision that’s beyond the clumsy and borderline brainless Tess and Deedee.
The juxtaposition between the pageant girl-like qualities of the Glamazonian hostesses and the former Stank Rail girls, who evince an unparalleled devotion to the bit, allows Stop! That! Train! to derive amusing tension between types of drag. In an introductory musical number, the Glamazonian girls effortlessly dance and rhyme their way through their greetings. Once they chime in, Tess and DeeDee sound like they’re doing an awkward confessional, with the latter hilariously stating, “I’m DeeDee and I was born with adult teeth.”
Stop! That! Train! handles the dumbest things with just the right amount of seriousness, and it’s more than self-aware of its own silliness. As she’s briefed on an oncoming storm by her advisor (Matt Rogers), President Judy Gagwell’s (RuPaul Charles) team hands her dossiers, circus props, and toys so that they tower in her arms, almost obscuring her face, all while the information on the disastrous “stormaganza” that the train is headed toward is delivered with a straight face. A subsequent joke cleverly plays on the delivery of the info (and of the lines themselves), with Gagwell requesting her press secretary to synthesize the report and “tell it to me straight” and, then, in an affectionate nod to homosexual affectations, to “tell it to me gay.”
The film is filled with jokes that appeal to gay pop culture fans (like a cute running gag in which no one on the train cares about Sarah Michelle Gellar), but Stop! That! Train!’s most compelling comic material delights in the actual language of gay comedy. “Can you read me?” asks Rachel Bloom’s train traffic controller, to which Latrice Royale, head cocked and eyes wide, retorts, “Girl, where do I start?” Elsewhere, there’s a Looney Tunes quality to the jokes around how common sentiments, such as feelings about a politician, are communicated through different phrases or queer colloquialisms. Friel and Wright have sharply avoided the trap of “reference as joke” and instead crafted cracks written in the voice of good judies kiki’ing with one another.
And though RuPaul may be one of the most powerful queer people in culture today, Stop! That! Train! is a pleasant reminder that, fracking controversies aside, he didn’t become the “Empress of Drag” for no reason. His witchy cackle, not-quite-deadpan delivery, and rubbery face is calibrated for an expressiveness that fits the ridiculous tone of the film. He falls in the same lineage as Charles Busch, Lypsinka, and other drag legends as performers who bend the timbre and cadence of the work around their style of expressiveness: controlled bombast that comes off as strangely elegant, like a train that’s only on track when it’s been derailed.
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