Women of Action: Laura Harring – Derailed
The 2002 Van Damme vehicle Derailed came off the tracks, if you’ll excuse the bad pun, just minutes into the movie. It never gets off to the kind of start that a movie of this type needs. The hero isn’t introduced in an exciting way and the villain is so bland and boring that I had to look up his name on IMDb just to write it in my notes. There is one thing, however, that makes Derailed stand out from the crowd of direct to video actioners starring actors seemingly on their way off the top of the mountain; these puppies…
Those breasts belong to Ms. Laura Elena Harring and they are something else. If you’re looking for a more seductive actress to play the role of a lady master thief with a bodacious body then look no further. Harring steals the first third of the film with her sexuality and despite the lack of a real purpose for her character beyond the first act, she at least gets to point a gun at some people.
That’s not totally accurate, though. Laura’s character Galina Konstantin (wtf is with that name) also gets to lay the smack down on a few of the would-be terrorists.
Surprisingly, Van Damme and Harring never trade fluids during the movie. Van Damme is a happily married man and his family makes the horrible decision to surprise him on board the train of death and eventually become captives. The filmmakers do an absolutely horrible job with Derailed for most of the movie and the addition of the family adds very little to the movie. I would have rather seen him make a connection with the thief-turned-good girl Galina Konstantin and then have to save her from being murdered. Instead they pretty much dose her character with smallpox and leave her to sweat uncontrollably in a train car.
Derailed landed in that 10 year gap in Van Damme’s career where most of his movies are downright terrible. Save for Legionnaire and maybe one more, you can pretty much skip half of dozen of his films in that decade. If you’re looking for one more reason not to watch Derailed, I would probably rank it no higher than third when it comes to “Die Hard on a train” rip offs. Not the best.
Since this article was such a downer, allow me to leave you with one last picture of the lovely Laura Elena Harring.
