Movie Reviews: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

June 13, 2009 by admin  
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The players: Director: Tony Scott, Writer: Brian Helgeland, Cast: Denzel Washington, John Travolta, James Gandolfini, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Brian Haley

Facts of interest: Remake of Joseph Sargent’s 1974 flick of the same title.

The plot: A New York City subway dispatcher is thrust into the middle of a hostage situation on-board a subway train.

Our thoughts: I didn’t exactly love Tony Scott’s “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3” remake, but much to the film’s credit, it sure did entertain me for most of its running time. “Pelham” has its flaws, and the central plot could have been a tad more intriguing, but all in all, it qualifies as a decent summer thriller that mostly works.

Denzel Washington plays Walter Garber, a New York City subway dispatcher who’s in for quite the ride when he’s pulled into the middle of a hijacking of one of his trains. Orchestrating the hostage situation is a man called Ryder (John Travolta), who threatens to kill passengers unless he receives $10 million in less than an hour.

That’s the basic setup of the film, and for the next hour and a half, Walter is glued to his radio trying everything in his power to keep the situation under control. Ryder, however, is a clever guy who doesn’t want to be messed with, and his cocky attitude and dangerous honesty further complicate things for Walter and everybody else involved.

“Pelham 1 2 3” is an overall vibrant thriller that successfully manages to generate a solid dose of suspense, despite a more or less simplistic story line that boasts strong characters but otherwise remains rather thin. The film remains quite interesting until the final act, which quickly derails when Walter and Ryder finally meet face to face.

It’s a shame really that things get out of hand in the end, mainly because the final showdown is just so much worse than the rest of the film. There are many ways they could have wrapped up the movie, but this one is clearly the most disappointing. Think of it as the easy way out of something more complex.

What I did like about “Pelham” were the characters. Washington’s Walter is a man with an interesting personality, and through his radio conversations with Ryder, audiences get to catch a good look at how he really functions. To be honest, the verbal cat-and-mouse game between the two is what I found most intriguing about the flick.

Tony Scott is someone with his own special directorial/visual style, and “Pelham” is no different than his other films. The fast editing and overall hectic direction certainly give the whole thing an extra edge, but not every cinemagoer will appreciate these extravagant technical aspects.

Both Washington and Travolta deliver decent enough acting, but neither of them really stands out. They make their characters work and come across authentic enough, but we don’t really see that one special thing in either one of their performances.

Freaky quote: “Let them unload on me.” – John Travolta

The final word: All in all, I mildly enjoyed the ride on Scott’s “Pelham 1 2 3.” It’s by no means a memorable thriller or even a film I would revisit, but it definitely kept me engaged until things start blowing up toward the end.

Source:  screeninglog

Reviews 2: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Before I get into whether or not The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is any good (which is what we all came here for), I have to do what amounts to a public service announcement. It’s not directed at anyone specifically, although you can certainly feel free to believe that it is.

Consider it a lesson for life, but if you’ve got an actor that recently dressed in drag and in a fat suit simultaneously while singing songs about busting loose on the dance floor, you might want to avoid introducing his character in your movie by slow-mo-ing a closeup of his face to the hook of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems.” Yes, it’s a bad ass song, but you’ve still got to make your character look a bit more bad ass before he gets to walk into the scene to Hova.

That being said, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is actually a fairly capable flick. Despite Tony Scott’s best laid plans to shake my eyeballs loose from my head with his MTV-style editing in the first start-and-stop ten minutes, the rest of the film goes on to set up a stark hostage scenario where the stakes keep getting higher and the human lives at stake are in real danger.

Walter Garber (Denzel Washington) is the unlucky dispatcher who gets the call from Ryder (John Travolta) and a band of armed hijackers who have taken over the Pelham 1 2 3 subway train, demanding $10 million be delivered in one hour, and promising to kill a passenger every minute past the deadline.

What works about Pelham is that, despite being high concept, there’s a solid focus on the characters that gives us shades of who they are without getting too preachy or attempting to get deeper than it needs to. This, I would credit to the writing of Brian Helgeland who has churned out more than his fair share of thrillers and suspense. The writing is closer to Man on Fire than L.A. Confidential, but hell, Man on Fire was a pretty great movie, too.

Helgeland balances those character moments with action beats that usually amount to the severe threat on a person’s life. The writing also tends to reveal more personally about the characters during those action beats – which works really well. Ryder’s inability to see people as innocent, his need to blame others for his own actions. Garber’s self-sacrificing nature even when he’s doing something unethical. Both meet in the middle in a strange way that adds another layer to what could have been a direct-to-DVD movie about a group of people trapped underground. (Did anyone else see Fire Down Below?)

There’s no doubt that Washington’s character Garber is the main focus. Even if he wasn’t, the level of acting talent Washington brings to the table would have elevated him to the forefront anyway. There’s no actor working in Hollywood today that plays the role of the reluctant hero better. Somehow, Washington is able to create an everyman character who you have no trouble believing can rise to the occasion if necessary. He’s basically John McClane if Die Hard were about some schlub off the streets instead of a cop.

But in certain ways, the film could have been renamed Deja Vu 2: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. I’m sure some audiences will check it out without knowing Tony Scott directed both, and they’ll instantly be able to recognize the style, probably accusing the director of ripping off his own work.

My main concern after seeing the opening scenes (other than trying to find my seizure medication) was that Travolta was going to drag the movie down. Luckily, his Ryder is fairly strong – usually when he calms down and focuses on what the character is doing. Travolta has a tendency to force how rough and rugged he’s supposed to be (mostly with shrieking outbursts), and it’s either Helgeland’s fault or the actor’s fault for not catching it, but Travolta sounds like a Dachshund pretending to be a Bulldog whenever he curses. And he curses a lot.

Still, he’s not totally miscast. But the film itself does a worse job of trying to be bad ass when it isn’t – mostly through the use of freeze frame images that flash how much time is left before the deadline ends and a google maps-style fly over of New York City showing where the money is en route to the drop location. However, these elements actually grew on me as the movie progresses, and I learned to lean heavily on how much time was left. Had that time been used flippantly, it would have been the most annoying element of the film, but since the time is basically humanly accurate (unlike most movies where a hero has time to talk his lady friend into marriage, say goodbye to his best pal, then disarm a bomb all within 15 seconds), it becomes a cool feature that justifies its early use.

Unfortunately, they are still gimmicks living within an otherwise pretty passable movie. I say passable because there’s nothing that goes beyond a decently fun crime movie into mind-blowing territory. Washington is great as the guy he’s come to exclusively play, Travolta is decent, and the supporting cast (specifically John Turturro and James Gandalfini) is strong – but the film plays out basically like you’d expect it to. Like it has to, I would think. So it doesn’t stick with you in any way. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you’re in the mood for a popcorn flick, but it felt a little like actual deja vu as I sat in the theater watching Denzel Washington try to save the city again.

The movie’s saving grace is its unwillingness to pull punches. It could have easily set up a hostage situation and played the tension out from that one scenario to the very end, but if there’s one strong suit to Ryder (and how Travolta plays him), it’s that he seems unconcerned with death. He’s a very real terrorist, and if he threatens to do something, he’ll do it. The response is sometimes shocking, sometimes expected, but it’s great to see a hostage-taker that just bluffs all the time in hopes that the money will come through.

Source: filmschoolrejects

Reviews 3: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

I didn’t have much hope for Tony Scott’s remake* of the brilliant 1974 film “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” (we don’t spell out words anymore because words are for queers) but I hoped that it would at least acknowledge the greatness of that movie and if it wanted to update the story (and I’ll admit there’s room for an update although the original still works perfectly), it would show a little love towards Joseph Sargent’s film. Maybe they would remix David Shire’s unforgettable theme from the flick and use that to open the movie.

And then they open with Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” and you realize that this isn’t a remake you tolerate as much as you endure it.

taking_pelham_01.jpgThe basic plot is the same: four armed men take hostages on a New York City subway and while the cops and city government do what they can, it mostly rests on a civil servant to handle the situation. And this is where there’s room for the update. We’re in the post-9/11 world and real-time technology allows both new weapons and defenses in crafting the story. While writer Brian Helgeland and Scott do an admirable job in weaving in modern technology, they drop the simple stuff that made the first film such a tight thriller and give the film over to the obnoxious work of John Travolta as the film’s villain and Scott’s predictable, laughably-bad hyper-editing.

Any actor in a remake of “Pelham” should go in another direction from Robert Shaw’s cool, calculating performance as the lead villain in the original, but Travolta not only chews the scenery like it’s made out of chocolate and meth, he gives same kind of hammy performance we’ve already seen from him in “Broken Arrow”, “Face/Off”, “Swordfish”, and just about every other baddie he plays. Tonally, it matches Scott’s headache-inducing edits but two people screeching at you aren’t any better than just one person screeching at you.

The Taking of Pelham 123 movie image Denzel Washington.jpgOf course, Scott does what he always does: hyperactive editing regardless of the appropriate tonality as dictated by the narrative. It’s maddening and absolutely baffling how anyone could be this one-note of a filmmaker and continue to make such high-profile pictures. In a way, it’s worse than someone like Uwe Boll because at least Boll isn’t going near projects anyone cares about and while you know a Boll movie will be awful, you’re not exactly sure how it will be awful.

In the middle of it all is the great Denzel Washington. Washington is an actor far better than Scott deserves but the two clearly enjoy working together as this is their fourth collaboration and Washington manages a performance that is reminiscent of Walter Matthau’s (although they’re two different characters in two different professions; Matthau was a transit cop and Washington is a dispatcher) but ultimately stands on its own. Washington delivers shading, patience, humor, sadness, and a fully-developed character that is completely out of place in a movie where the director uses laughably bad countdown reminders of the hostage-takers’ deadline (you get the number of minutes remaining over a freeze frame with a loud “DONG” sound effect).

Most frustrating is that this remake could have been surprisingly good. In addition to the technological upgrades and the post-9/11 setting, Travolta’s character, in terms of dialogue, is an interesting villain as he’s set up as someone who manipulates the stock market and always blames others for his misdeeds. Under the terrible “thug” threads and painful acting, there’s a fresh and timely character waiting to be unleashed. And under Scott’s “look-at-me” editing, there’s a story that, with a little bit of polish, could be a tight little thriller. But Scott couldn’t care less about any of that. Instead, he provides a tedious and silly version of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man” and neglects the 1974 version of “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3″ because that version had real performances set in a real world in a movie comprised of real editing techniques.

Rating: D plus

*Although both films are loosely based on John Godey’s novel of the same name.

Reviews 4: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

“I left my Rudy Giuliani suit at home,” says the mayor of New York City, brushing off an aide’s plea to use an unfolding crisis as an opportunity to make a show of leadership for the cameras. Played by James Gandolfini with a demeanor more fussy than thuggish, this fictional successor to Mr. Giuliani presides over an identifiably post-Rudy, post-9/11 metropolis, a shiny, busy place ruled by money and ambition and shadowed less by fear of crime than by anxious memories of terrorism and perhaps by an intimation of leaner times ahead.

“The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,” Tony Scott’s canny, energetic updating of the 1974 mass transit thriller, takes account of how much the character — to say nothing of the characters — of New York has changed since that almost mythic decade of decline and default. Like the original film, adapted from John Godey’s novel, this version, with a script by Brian Helgeland, deals with the brazen, borderline-insane hijacking of a local train on the Lexington Avenue line, but the subway system itself serves as an index of how the city and action-movie technology have evolved over the years.

The real-world Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which gave Mr. Scott and his crew extraordinary access to its trains, tunnels and command centers, may be something of a bureaucratic basket case, but on screen at least, the sleek, graffiti-free cars and the humming high-tech screens of the dispatching headquarters are a far cry from the rickety dishevelment of the old days, when Walter Matthau was a hangdog transit cop playing cat and mouse with a mysterious criminal gang led by a suave and brutal Robert Shaw.

Matthau’s character was called Zachary Garber, and in what seems to be an act of homage, Denzel Washington’s Garber has been given the name Walter. This Garber is a transit authority stalwart who has worked his way up through the ranks from motorman to an executive position, though when we meet him he seems to be on his way back down again, having been demoted to dispatcher, pending an investigation into accusations of bribe taking.

Mr. Washington, perhaps the most effortlessly charismatic American film actor since Paul Newman, is, like Newman, best when his magnetism is dented by failure or tarnished by meanness or sleaze. In this case his quiet, stoical everyman heroism is deepened by the suggestion of a smudge on his character, a sense of moral compromise that both connects him with, and distinguishes him from, the would-be criminal mastermind who becomes his nemesis.

That would be a mysterious fellow named Ryder, played by John Travolta with a wolfish grin, a tattooed neck and a degree of overstatement as calculated and professional as Mr. Washington’s ostentatious display of restraint. The two actors interact mostly via squawk box, cellphone and radio, as Ryder in his purloined subway car issues demands to Garber at his desk. But even at a distance from each other, they conduct a tag-team master class in old-style movie star technique, barreling through every cliché and nugget of corn the script has to offer with verve and conviction. Even when you don’t really believe them, they’re always a lot of fun to watch.

As are the members of a supporting cast assembled to fill out a tableau of plausible if not altogether authentic male New Yorkness. (Sticklers will note that Mr. Washington and Mr. Travolta are both children of the suburbs, the one hailing from Mount Vernon, up in Westchester, the other from Englewood, N.J.). In addition to Mr. Gandolfini, there is John Turturro as an N.Y.P.D. hostage-negotiation specialist, Michael Rispoli as Garber’s stick-in-the-mud supervisor and the indispensable Luis Guzmán as a disgraced motorman who has joined Ryder’s gang.

Women are decidedly marginal in this urban gallery. Garber’s wife (Aunjanue Ellis) answers the phone every now and then back home in Queens, and the girlfriend of a hostage appears by online video chat. But romance and domesticity have never figured very prominently in Mr. Scott’s imagination.

Nor is the dense dramatic loam of actual urban life, the soil from which even a preposterous story like this might plausibly sprout, something Mr. Scott is inclined to dig into. He’s not Sidney Lumet. But he is an exceptionally adept choreographer of visual disorder, a tireless if sometimes exhausting master of rococo action cinema.

Often, as in the rabid revenge thriller “Man on Fire” or the time-travel terrorism whatsit “Déjà Vu,” both starring Mr. Washington, Mr. Scott’s kineticism gets the better of him, and his whirring contraptions spin and splinter when he wants them to swoop and soar. But in “Pelham 1 2 3” the stubborn, earthbound fact of the subways serves as an anchor, constraining his indulgences much as it limits the options of both the criminals and the civic authorities in the movie. The gritty physicality of subway cars and tunnels balances the director’s signature flights into G.P.S. and Google Earth-inspired bird’s-eye moviemaking. Mr. Scott and his cinematographer, Tobias Schliessler, compose a symphony of light and darkness as the action moves from sunlit streets to fluorescent interiors to dank, subterranean spaces.

Some of the above-ground action — in particular some hectic vehicular mayhem — feels a little routine, and a number of potentially intriguing narrative avenues remain unexplored. But tucked inside this efficiently engineered adrenaline-delivery system is a sharp little parable about the city that serves as its backdrop and its borrowed soul. Ryder, like most overachieving movie bad guys, fancies himself a righteous avenger and a philosopher of the deed, but he is really a demonic, hyperbolic incarnation of greed, a symbol of the money culture run amok.

No one is untouched by moral rot: not Garber, a dedicated civil servant tempted to skim a little cream, nor the mayor, mired in lame-duck cynicism after wrecking marriage and career in pursuit of sexual gratification. The heroes and villains are separated not by metaphysical essence but by choices, habits and the durability of a native ethical instinct, embodied in the flawed, diffident Walter Garber, that somehow survives amid all the excess and corruption. The best, truest and most unashamedly sentimental image of New York in “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3” comes in the film’s final shot of an outer-borough homeowner walking home from the subway after a hard day’s work, having saved the city once again.

“The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has intense violence and frequent repetition of every true New Yorker’s favorite word.

THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Tony Scott; written by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by John Godey; director of photography, Tobias Schliessler; edited by Chris Lebenzon; music by Harry Gregson-Williams; production designer, Chris Seagers; produced by Todd Black, Mr. Scott, Jason Blumenthal and Steve Tisch; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

WITH: Denzel Washington (Walter Garber), John Travolta (Ryder), John Turturro (Camonetti), Luis Guzmán (Phil Ramos), Michael Rispoli (John Johnson), James Gandolfini (Mayor), Frank Wood (Police Commissioner Sterman), John Benjamin Hickey (Deputy Mayor LaSalle), Gary Basaraba (Jerry Pollard) and Ramon Rodriguez (Delgado).

Source: NYT