It’s weird. Watching the movie previews right before The Taking of Pelham 123, the Denzel Washington/John Travolta thriller, I had to ask myself: Are these actual movies? Or are they parodies of movies? There were bad rom-com setups involving Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn; a lousy Bruce Willis sci-fi movie called Obsessed that seemed to recall about a half dozen other lousy sci-fi movies. When even the two-minute previews can’t sustain interest or belief, you’re in trouble. I felt like it was a gag reel of upcoming attractions, like the beginning of Tropic of Thunder.
But no. That’s just the way movies are now. And that’s pretty much the level of Pelham 123, a Tony Scott gloss on the not-quite-classic 1974 original. I enjoyed watching that original on TV (before cable): Robert Shaw as a menacing bad guy who hijacks a metro train, Walter Matthau as a cynical NYC cop who ends up “negotiating” with the lead subway terrorist through much of the movie. Despite its low profile (and the bad guys’ demand, in true Dr. Evil fashion, for “one meel-ion dollars”), the original Pelham took some solid Watergate-era snipes at corrupt politicians and offered some cheap thrills.
Cheap thrills is about all you’ll get from Tony Scott’s remake. The casting seems self-defeating: While Denzel Washington’s seasoned presence can streamline a movie, Travolta’s overacting instantly causes train wrecks. So they cancel each other out.
The setup is this: Travolta — these days content to play the same bad guy over and over — is “Ryder,” a a subway hijacker who demands $10 million from the city of New York. Every minute they’re late with his money, he will shoot a passenger. He focuses on subway dispatcher Walter Garber (Washington), whom he thinks he can trust — and manipulate — to get him his money. Garber, we learn, has some skeletons in his closet: he may/may not have taken a bribe from a Japanese train contractor, and is under suspicion. Part of the “hook” in this less-than-thrilling ride is debating whether or not you think Garber is innocent. I hate when directors cultivate this kind of ambiguity: it smells of desperation, like the movie can’t sustain itself without some kind of post-movie discussion.
Scott — a former TV ad director, like brother Ridley — also has an annoying habit of freeze-framing the action and inserting a little title mid-screen saying “22 minutes left,” “15 minutes left,” etc. He does this a lot in recent movies. It reminds me of those public service ads — dark, gritty, with lots of freeze frames — that they show before movies in Manila. Cue “edgy” music: “You wouldn’t steal a car, or a computer… So don’t steal movies! Don’t watch pirated DVDs! Video piracy is killing movies!”
Not this one, though: this one was dead on arrival.
No time for such niceties in Scott’s remake; you just get a kid with a laptop onboard the train whose girlfriend is doing a webcam striptease for him before the subway car enters a tunnel. Naturally, the laptop later acts as a surveillance camera for the cops. Not much time to develop Washington or Travolta’s back stories either, because, well, the clock is ticking and Travolta has to start capping passengers. His cohorts, too, are nameless thugs who look like they just escaped from prison. Central Casting’s idea of “ex-cons,” I suppose.
Another cool thing about the 1974 original is that Shaw’s suave gang leader (also named Ryder) used color-coded names, so he was “Mr. Blue,” his partners were “Mr. Green,” “Mr. Grey,” “Mr. Brown,” etc. (You didn’t think Quentin Tarantino thought that up all by himself, did you?)
Much of the fun in the original came from showing Ryder’s gang self-destruct: they can’t hold it together long enough to escape the subway tunnel with their one meel-ion dollars; Ryder (Shaw) ends up grabbing a third rail and electrocuting himself rather than face prison; others are shot dead. Garber (Matthau) learns that one of the accomplices was a disgruntled former subway motorman, and works his way through a list of disgruntled former motormen to recover the money. He tracks down “Mr. Green” (Martin Balsam) to his apartment, but gets stonewalled; then, as Garber’s about to leave, he hears Mr. Green sneezing — it’s the same sneeze that Garber heard while Mr. Green was making demands over the dispatcher radio. Case closed. Sure, this would never actually hold up in court; but you’ve got to love those ‘70s movie endings.
Scott has nothing so clever up his sleeve in the Pelham remake. It’s a buy-the-numbers Hollywood re-do with the usual quota of car crashes, bullet-riddled bodies and squealing brakes. Everything running on schedule, with no surprises. Fortunately, for entertainment’s sake, there were moments that had my wife and I guffawing out loud (like when Washington pops up out of a subway grate — and just happens to see the escaping Travolta character a few feet away about to enter a cab on the same street. What are the odds, really? Or when Washington, moments after shooting Travolta in his tracks, gets a helicopter fly-by wave from John Turturro’s NYPD character. Never a cop around when you need one…). Even James Gandolfini — on hand as an unpopular New York mayor trying to restore his fallen credibility — fails to bring much juice to this outing. Maybe if he’d whacked a few guys, for old time’s sake.