If you want to argue that “Unstoppable” is about anything beyond provoking a Pavlovian drug-addict response from the audience, then it’s about men and their machines, both portrayed at least as lovingly as in those Soviet boy-meets-locomotive movies that Scott probably saw in film school in London, 130 years ago. Like so many American movies these days, “Unstoppable” is a semi-conscious nostalgic fantasy, set in an imaginary version of Middle America where the Industrial Age never ended and the immigrants (or at least the non-white ones) never showed up. The fictional Pennsylvania towns endangered by the runaway train loaded with toxic chemicals appear to be entirely Caucasian, except of course for Frank, the grumpy-charismatic train engineer played by Denzel Washington, who has a pair of hawt teenage daughters working their shift at Hooters on the day he faces death. (It wouldn’t be a Tony Scott film without lecherous background details.)

Now, in case you’re wondering, you didn’t imagine it: Scott and Washington really did just make a train movie, and here they are with another one. Let’s enumerate the important differences. “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3″ invoked clichés about ungovernable and corrupt big-city America, while “Unstoppable” invokes clichés about rock-solid, if dumbass, rural America. The train in Exhibit A was mostly stationary, while the train in Exhibit B is hauling ass, along with several carloads of an unstable and dangerous compound called molten phenol. The wearing-headphones-and-explaining-everything role, which belonged to Washington in “Pelham,” goes to the ever-appealing Rosario Dawson here. (OK, she’s the other nonwhite person in Pennsylvania.) The suit-wearing overlord who wants to cover the whole thing up, James Gandolfini in “Pelham,” is Kevin Dunn in the new movie, while Kevin Corrigan plays the officious, semi-helpful expert role, inhabited last year by John Turturro.

In “Pelham,” Washington played a courtly, sarcastic, vaguely troubled family man, while here he — oh, forget it. One could complain, I guess, about the fact that an actor of Washington’s range and presence plays the same guy in film after film, and seems supremely comfortable in the craptastic action cinema of Tony Scott. (This is at least their fifth movie together.) But you know what? Denzel is a movie star, and he’s probably getting good career advice: Give the public the crusty, crafty, upstanding character it expects. There’s no need to rehearse, and the checks have a lot of zeroes on them.

If Frank seems to embody the crisis of masculinity in one guy — he’s a mediocre single dad, being shoved into involuntary retirement — he’s got help. Washington’s sidekick here is Chris Pine, who played Captain Kirk in the recent “Star Trek” reboot and seems like this year’s contender for neo-Russell Crowe stardom. Pine plays Will, a trainee conductor with a restraining order hanging over him who makes an absent-minded mistake, one that could send his and Frank’s train into a head-on collision with Train 777, which is coming straight at them at full speed with nobody on board. Will and Frank had nothing to do with that in the first place; 777 escaped because of a fat guy in the train yard. (You can’t say that Scott doesn’t understand visual language at its most primitive level, and here’s one of its rules: Fat people are funny.)

After surviving that encounter, Frank and Will decide to defy their spineless bosses and take down 777 on their own, before it can get to the Big City and blow up a lot of blond moppets at the breakfast table. I’m not supposed to tell you how that turns out, but you only get one guess. (Mark Bomback’s screenplay is nominally based on a real 2001 incident in Ohio.) Given that nearly the entire movie consists of high-speed stunt work, guys barking clipped shop-talk into intercoms and phones and walkie-talkies, and photography of various decrepit and/or beautiful Midwestern and Appalachian locations — much of it was indeed shot in central Pennsylvania, but West Virginia, Ohio and western New York are also in there — “Unstoppable” is one of Scott’s cleanest and most effective movies. It delivers exactly the guy-friendly thrill ride it promises, and offers a predictable and entirely fantastic catharsis for its working-class heroes.

I’d like it a lot better, in fact, if Scott could resist his recent tendency to make his movies into sophomoric college essays about the power of the media, man. At least “Unstoppable” doesn’t rest on an entirely ludicrous premise the way “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3″ did, with its Wi-Fi-equipped New York subway tunnels. As if not content with cinematographer Ben Seresin’s jittery, streaky, speed-up-then-slow-down images, Scott shows us much of the pursuit of Train 777 as it’s being seen on TV. It’s a bit too O.J. Simpson, and feels like the wrong answer to a question nobody asked, arriving half a beat late. Instead of asking us to sit still through an entire motion picture, albeit one of the most hyperactive ever made, Scott decides to make us feel just as nervous as if we actually were watching YouTube and the evening news and Colbert and John Boehner and Denzel Washington’s foxy daughters, all at once.

Yes, yes, “Dear John” dethroned “Avatar” at the top of the box office over Super Bowl weekend. Wow… a film’s opening weekend managed to exceed another film’s eighth weekend. I got into this in some detail on my Open Salon blog over the weekend, but I personally think that the whole ‘”Dear John” beat “Avatar”‘ story is relatively pointless. And I certainly enjoy the irony of pundits jumping up and down over the fact that a very female-driven film defeated another film that itself was playing very well for women. “Avatar” writer/director James Cameron is a man. “Dear John” author Nicolas Sparks and director Lasse Hallström are also men. Both films involve (to differing degrees of emphasis) romantic drama in the shadow of war. Both films involve handsome but somewhat bland male leads (Sam Worthington and Channing Tatum) being out-acted and generally outclassed by their female partners (Zoe Saldana and Amanda Seyfried). Trying to spin the weekend’s box office as the girls smacking down the boys on Super Bowl weekend is not only relatively false, but awfully condescending and sexist to boot. It’s basically saying: Wow, a “girl movie” was able to compete in a male dominated marketplace! That’s so shocking! No one could have predicted that because girl movies are lame! Besides, we all know that Channing Tatum will walk away with the lion’s share of the credit, just as the media bent over backwards to give Ryan Reynolds credit for “The Proposal.” Tatum will get his pick of franchises, while Seyfried will get to choose between being the token love interest/damsel in distress in one of said franchises or starring in another installment of “I’m Nothing Without a Man.”

But weep not for James Cameron, for “Avatar” still pulled in another $23.6 million. Having crossed the $600 million mark and overtaken “Titanic” as the top domestic grosser of all time, “Avatar” now sits with a massive $630 million domestic gross. The film had its second-biggest weekend plunge yet, dropping a whole 24 percent in weekend eight. Still, the comparatively large drop lends credence to the idea that the film was playing very well with females, hence it was hurt by direct demo competition. The film’s new worldwide total is a whopping $2.204 billion, or just short of the magic $2.39 billion mark (at which point it will have doubled the worldwide take of every other film ever made save “Titanic”). I suppose if you wanted to nitpick, you could say that “Avatar” was number one for a mere seven weekends while “Titanic” was number one for 15 weekends. As many of you probably recall, “Titanic” was No. 1 all the way up until April 3, when it was dethroned by “Lost in Space” (quick — what are the two connections between “Lost in Space” and “Dear John”?). Like “Avatar’s” close calls with “Sherlock Holmes” and “The Book of Eli,” “Titanic” actually lost the Friday race three times during its spree, to “U.S. Marshals,” “The Man in the Iron Mask” and the re-release of “Grease,” respectively.

It now shares its top in the top 10 for consecutive No. 1 weekends with “Ghostbusters” and “On Golden Pond,” and shares the No. 12 spot for total number one weekends with the Henry Fonda melodrama. Slightly more troubling (relative to a picture that’s already the biggest moneymaker of all time) is that “Avatar” just barely beat “Titanic’s” $23 million record for the biggest eighth weekend. By next weekend, barring a miracle, “Avatar” will likely start grossing less on a weekend-to-weekend basis than “Titanic” (the doomed ocean romancer actually went up 22 percent for a $28 million “Valentine’s Day”-infused eighth weekend). Still, the movie is going to take a huge hit on March 5 anyway, when it loses its IMAX and many of its 3D screens to Tim Burton’s “Return to Oz,” I mean “Alice in Wonderland.” The goal from here on out is to cross the fabled $700 million mark and try for $2.5 billion worldwide before all is said and done. Point being, “Avatar” may have lost its No. 1 weekend ranking, but the phenomenon is still ‘king of the world’ for all intents and purposes.

Third place went to the horribly marketed “From Paris With Love.” The John Travolta/Jonathan Rhys Meyers action vehicle attempted to replicate the Super Bowl opening of “Taken” (same director), but Lionsgate forgot that 20th Century Fox did a bang-up job marketing the Liam Neeson vehicle, with a tense and provocative teaser that gave away almost nothing from the film’s second and third acts. Lionsgate released a flurry of confused and off-putting trailers (John Travolta is: the Ugly American!) that couldn’t decide whether to sell the ultra-violence or the comedy. Frankly the earlier film benefited just a touch from the widespread availability of DVD-quality bootlegs a month prior to the U.S. release. Since the film played a little older than the normal downloading crowd, the youngsters had a month to tell their parents that grown-up star Liam Neeson’s new action picture was all kinds of bad-ass. So “Taken” opened with $24.7 million while “From Paris With Love” opened with just $8.1 million. To quote Lionsgate’s flagship character, “game over.”

Martin Campbell’s “Edge of Darkness” plunged a disturbing 59 percent in weekend two, meaning that it won’t come close to its $80 million production budget. I finally saw the picture and it’s better than I expected (the second half is awfully strong). But it’s more a portrait of wrenching grief than an action picture or even a thriller. Point being, the ads tried to sell it as a hard action thriller and now everybody knows otherwise. Its second weekend was $7 million and the film now sits at $29 million. When all is said and done, this will be Mel Gibson’s lowest-grossing vehicle since his directorial debut, “The Man Without a Face” (the dark, character-driven drama grossed $24 million in summer 1993). Oh well, better luck next time, Campbell and Gibson. “The Tooth Fairy” dropped 35 percent and now sits with $34 million, as does “Legion.” Last weekend’s other opener, “When in Rome,” fell 55 percent, leaving its 10-day total at $20 million. “The Book of Eli” crossed the $80 million mark, although $100 million may be out of reach. Still, as Denzel Washington vehicles go, this one ranks sixth at $82 million. Next on the list is the $88 million gross of “Inside Man” and the $91 million take of “Crimson Tide,” both of which are approachable. Oh, and “Sherlock Holmes” finally crossed the $200 million mark, so we’ll see a sequel in the next couple years.

The biggest beneficiary of Oscar nominations was “Crazy Heart,” which capitalized on last week’s nominations for stars Jeff Bridges (the likely winner for Best Actor) and Maggie Gyllenhaal by expanding to 819 screens. I still contend that opening this acclaimed country-music drama on Super Bowl weekend may have hindered the potential of the film’s wide release opening, but it still pulled in a decent $3.6 million, which leaves the $8 million picture with $11 million and a month to play wide before the awards are given out. The rest of the Oscar field was as expected. The more mainstream nominees (“Up in the Air,” “The Blind Side,” “Avatar,” “The Lovely Bones,” etc) were relatively unaffected. Many of the nominees are already on DVD (“A Serious Man,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “Up,” “The Hurt Locker,” “District 9,” etc.). But those smallish films that could be helped (“An Education,” “Precious,” “The Last Station”) generally received relatively large upswings at least in terms of pure weekend-to-weekend percentage changes.

Finally, there were a bazillion limited-release openings this weekend, and none of them particularly impressed. Of note, “The Red Riding Trilogy” and “Terribly Happy” did $15,000 and $11,000 on their respective single screens while “Frozen” and “District 13: Ultimatum” did a whopping $1,200 per in their respective 106 and nine-screen debuts. That’s about all the news for this weekend. Join us around Monday evening for a holiday wrap-up of the President’s Day long weekend, where the holdovers face off against three major new releases. Joe Johnston’s delayed and much-fussed-over “The Wolfman” opens against “Valentine’s Day.” Plus Chris Columbus, the man who cast the Harry Potter series, attempts to launch a new young-adult fantasy franchise with “Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.”

But that’s where the significant symbolism of “The Book of Eli” — which was written by Gary Whitta — begins and ends. Eli makes his way through this troubled futureville landscape, shooting and eating cats to survive (more on this later); he avoids evildoers when he can but doesn’t hesitate to use a handy multipurpose cutting tool (plus a bow-and-arrow) to lop off limbs and pierce sternums when necessary. In other words, this supposedly deeply spiritual journey is really mostly about kicking ass.

Movie lore is filled with righteous heroes and antiheroes who use the word of God either as a warped justification for their actions or as a salve to help them cope with the evil deeds they must commit to survive. Washington’s Eli falls pretty much into the latter category, although that doesn’t stop him from slicing-and-dicing a whole saloon’s worth of baddies when the occasion calls for it. Eli is really just a wanderer — for a time, he’s lucky enough to have a pretty young companion named Solara (Mila Kunis), who’s escaped from Carnegie’s clutches. Together they drift through this glum landscape, all gray desert and khaki clouds: The movie was shot by Don Burgess in those desaturated, not-quite-sepia, not-quite-black-and-white tones that have become de rigueur for movies set in the grim near-future. (Someone should trademark the process, fast, under the name Apocalypticolor.)

“The Book of Eli” is somewhat entertaining, in its own little mud-brown way. And while it bears a passing resemblance to John Hillcoat’s brooding adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” — another movie that’s heavy on futuristic cannibals — “The Book of Eli” isn’t a heavy-duty downer. Washington is pretty good at playing the noble warrior, although he’s even better when he settles down and opens his precious book for inspiration: When he reads the words, aloud, he’s tuned in to their sometimes harsh, sometimes radiant poetry — his melodic intonation qualifies as a kind of hypnotism. And even if the movie does take place in a grim futureworld, it isn’t completely joyless: At one point Eli and Solara encounter an elderly couple, played by Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour, who welcome the wanderers into their remarkably well-preserved farmhouse for a spot of tea. The woman asks them if they’d like to hear a little music — “It’s so soothing!” she coos — and when they agree, hesitantly, Gambon cranks up an old victrola and the crackly strains of Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell” fill the air. (Wait a minute — was this thing directed by the Hughes Brothers, or the Hues Corporation?)

But sometimes the Hughes Brothers seem to be going for laughs in the wrong places. Cat lovers might want to know that in the film’s early moments, Eli shoots, roasts and eats a hairless cat. While you could argue that Eli needs to eat the cat to survive, in a later scene he bullies — although, thankfully, doesn’t eat — a curious and presumably harmless Persian cat. The incident is brief and mostly dumb, but it also seems to stem from the lugnut idea that it’s somehow “manly” to dislike cats.

Something tells me Jesus would have no truck with that idea, but never mind. The Hughes Brothers may want us to think they’re giving us a few deep, quasi-spiritual ideas, but what they’re really serving up is earnestly shallow, machete-and-bow-and-arrow entertainment. They’re clearly motivated by one central question, and it’s not “What Would Jesus Do?” More like “What Would Make Jesus Buy a Ticket?”