When judging
a remake, every
reviewer faces a
dilemma: Do I judge
this on its own merits,
or compare it to the
original?
The Taking of
Pelham 123, a
retelling of Joseph
Sargent’s cult 1974
caper film, makes it
easy — it sucks either
way you look at it.
Director Tony Scott (Man on Fire, Top Gun) has taken a fast-paced, thoroughly fun diversion and turned it into a heavyhanded slog. Don’t blame Denzel Washington, who does a fine job as NYC subway dispatcher Walter Garber. Near the end of an otherwise normal shift on an otherwise normal day, four thick-necked hijackers seize one of his trains.
Their leader (John Travolta), who calls himself Ryder, demands $10 million within an hour or the city of New York is going to have a train full of dead hostages on its hands. Garber has precious little time to cut through the red tape and deliver the cash. He has the additional task of keeping Ryder calm, which proves to be its own struggle when the evil genius starts flying off the handle and plugging hostages before the deadline.
It’s Travolta’s role that has undergone the most noticeable and damaging change from the original Pelham. In that film, Robert Shaw played a cold, laconic main villain. He was uninterested in chit-chat — he wanted his money, and that was that. You never knew much about him, and that made him both interesting and a little scary. Screenwriter Brian Helgeland (Mystic River) has re-imagined the character as the polar opposite, and whether you know Shaw’s portrayal or not is irrelevant. Ryder is a mercurial chatterbox, goading Garber into conversations about social ills, justice and the hereafter, making the core of the film less about the heist than Ryder’s gripes with society. It also turns Pelham into the umpteenth hostage flick in which criminal and negotiator, over the course of the ordeal, come to see a little of themselves in their opponent. Yawn. Part of the problem is that Travolta as a bad guy is perpetually miscast. He always seems to be having a great time hamming it up in movies like The Punisher and Swordfish, but he’s never believable and almost always ends up detracting from the larger film. Scott makes the unwise choice of hanging Pelham on Travolta’s scenerychomping portrayal, and his movie suffers. But Travolta isn’t the only one who took a wrong turn at the casting couch: James Gandolfini plays the craven NYC mayor who cries uncle roughly 30 seconds after receiving Ryder’s demands.
Not to pigeonhole an obviously gifted actor, but anyone who watched six seasons of “The Sopranos” will have a hard time buying a spineless Tony Soprano in an expensive suit. Casting is only part of the problem with Scott’s interpretation. He also has a tendency to bog down entire sequences with annoying flash — for evidence, look no further than the opening credits, scored to an endless, arrhythmic remix of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems.” It’s one of many parts of the film directed like a music video — his action scenes also make liberal use of a slowed-down frame rate effect you might remember from Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” clip, a ridiculous signature that makes much of the action visually incomprehensible. On its own, the film is generic and joyless. But having just seen the original version about a month ago, I also couldn’t help noting the many things Scott does in an attempt to differentiate his product, almost all of them negative. There was a charm to the original’s portrayal of 1970s New York that a version set in modern day will obviously lack. But Scott also saps the fun out of the command center, which originally was filled with banter between lead Walter Matthau and his prickly coworkers. In its place is a somber, hi-tech cave where glum, self-interested city officials try to outwit a nihilistic madman. Scott tinkers with the dynamic of the original, which saw irascible but honest cops chasing a crew of money-hungry robbers. It was simple but fun.
This time around, the hero has a little dirt on him, and the villain is portrayed as some kind of lost soul, which in this day and age is boilerplate stuff. Scott’s Pelham stands apart from its predecessor. In the process, it becomes indistinguishable from a hundred other cinematic standoffs.
! To comment on this article, send your e-mail to glen.baity@gmail.com.
Director Tony Scott (Man on Fire, Top Gun) has taken a fast-paced, thoroughly fun diversion and turned it into a heavyhanded slog. Don’t blame Denzel Washington, who does a fine job as NYC subway dispatcher Walter Garber. Near the end of an otherwise normal shift on an otherwise normal day, four thick-necked hijackers seize one of his trains.
Their leader (John Travolta), who calls himself Ryder, demands $10 million within an hour or the city of New York is going to have a train full of dead hostages on its hands. Garber has precious little time to cut through the red tape and deliver the cash. He has the additional task of keeping Ryder calm, which proves to be its own struggle when the evil genius starts flying off the handle and plugging hostages before the deadline.
It’s Travolta’s role that has undergone the most noticeable and damaging change from the original Pelham. In that film, Robert Shaw played a cold, laconic main villain. He was uninterested in chit-chat — he wanted his money, and that was that. You never knew much about him, and that made him both interesting and a little scary. Screenwriter Brian Helgeland (Mystic River) has re-imagined the character as the polar opposite, and whether you know Shaw’s portrayal or not is irrelevant. Ryder is a mercurial chatterbox, goading Garber into conversations about social ills, justice and the hereafter, making the core of the film less about the heist than Ryder’s gripes with society. It also turns Pelham into the umpteenth hostage flick in which criminal and negotiator, over the course of the ordeal, come to see a little of themselves in their opponent. Yawn. Part of the problem is that Travolta as a bad guy is perpetually miscast. He always seems to be having a great time hamming it up in movies like The Punisher and Swordfish, but he’s never believable and almost always ends up detracting from the larger film. Scott makes the unwise choice of hanging Pelham on Travolta’s scenerychomping portrayal, and his movie suffers. But Travolta isn’t the only one who took a wrong turn at the casting couch: James Gandolfini plays the craven NYC mayor who cries uncle roughly 30 seconds after receiving Ryder’s demands.
Not to pigeonhole an obviously gifted actor, but anyone who watched six seasons of “The Sopranos” will have a hard time buying a spineless Tony Soprano in an expensive suit. Casting is only part of the problem with Scott’s interpretation. He also has a tendency to bog down entire sequences with annoying flash — for evidence, look no further than the opening credits, scored to an endless, arrhythmic remix of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems.” It’s one of many parts of the film directed like a music video — his action scenes also make liberal use of a slowed-down frame rate effect you might remember from Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” clip, a ridiculous signature that makes much of the action visually incomprehensible. On its own, the film is generic and joyless. But having just seen the original version about a month ago, I also couldn’t help noting the many things Scott does in an attempt to differentiate his product, almost all of them negative. There was a charm to the original’s portrayal of 1970s New York that a version set in modern day will obviously lack. But Scott also saps the fun out of the command center, which originally was filled with banter between lead Walter Matthau and his prickly coworkers. In its place is a somber, hi-tech cave where glum, self-interested city officials try to outwit a nihilistic madman. Scott tinkers with the dynamic of the original, which saw irascible but honest cops chasing a crew of money-hungry robbers. It was simple but fun.
This time around, the hero has a little dirt on him, and the villain is portrayed as some kind of lost soul, which in this day and age is boilerplate stuff. Scott’s Pelham stands apart from its predecessor. In the process, it becomes indistinguishable from a hundred other cinematic standoffs.
! To comment on this article, send your e-mail to glen.baity@gmail.com.
