RuPaul

President Judy Gagwell sits aboard a luxury train that will not stop, holds a straight face, and waits. That stillness is the best thing RuPaul does in the 2026 runaway-train spoof, and it is a fair picture of the producer too: the calm centre while the noise happens around it. Adam Shankman, who made Hairspray (2007), directs the film as a drag-queen take on the 1980 airline disaster comedy, and RuPaul produces it with Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the World of Wonder partners of long standing.

The producing grew out of the performing and the two have never been separated. RuPaul began in Atlanta clubs and on public access television in the early 1980s, broke through with the album Supermodel of the World in 1993, hosted The RuPaul Show on VH1 from 1996 to 1998, and since 2009 has hosted and executive-produced RuPaul's Drag Race and its spin-offs around the world. The feature film is the newest branch of the same tree, the first of its kind and staffed almost entirely with drag performers, several of them graduates of the programme.

That is the method, and in the film it works exactly as far as the casting goes. Ginger Minj plays Tess as a woman who has dealt with worse than a runaway train before breakfast, and Jujubee's DeeDee panics in wide eyes and small screams beside her. We laughed out loud more than once, and nearly every time it was one of them, usually reacting to something rather than saying it. Put drag talent in front of a camera and let it work: that is the strength, and it is a real one.

The weakness is everything the casting cannot fix. Christina Friel and Connor Wright's script fires a gag every twenty seconds and lands about half, which is respectable and is also the ceiling. It recycles more than it invents, the cameos do the work the writing should, and the train never looks as if it weighs anything. The long-running series has drawn the occasional complaint that its format repeats itself across seasons and spin-offs, and the film's habit of borrowing rather than building is the same complaint in a different medium.

RuPaul has said of producers that "their job is to handle paperwork, but you create the jobs." The jobs are created; nobody doubts that. The next film, if there is one, needs a script as good as its casting director. Until then, see this one with a crowd that watches Drag Race, because that is who it was made for, and alone on a sofa it leaves the evening with time to spare.