Review: The Taking of Pelham 123

Ryder (John Travolta), the Gordon Gekko of the new millennium...

The Taking of Pelham 123 takes the great material of the original hostage and doesn't let it go. It doesn't kill it, it doesn't take it anywhere different. It just stalls—much like the titular train—in the middle of the track, in the middle of the movie, somewhere in the middle of this era of pointless remakes.

What the original represented was a tough, gritty, New York-state-of-mind thriller influencing everything from Quentin Tarantino to the Die Hard films. What 123 (streamlined from One Two Three) represents is, well, I don't know, a waste of time, talent, and money? Your money, at least—it takes the great material of the original hostage for your money—constantly threatening to do something with it just like John Travolta's shout-laugh-curse of a performance in nameless/faceless thug attire (anyone who praises him here obviously hasn't seen Broken Arrow, or Face/Off, or any other cheap villainous role he may take in this second-waning of his career).

The story is more or less the same, following the hijacking of a subway train in New York with behind-the-scenes operator Walter Garber (the always decent-enough Denzel Washington) squaring off in a war of (mostly) words with the mysterious Ryder (Travolta). The dialogue between the two is surprisingly fresh, but director Tony Scott has trouble playing it right. The truth is, he seems to have trouble playing a lot of things right. His quick-cut, sporadically slow-mo, sporadically sporadic direction is not exciting, not intensifying, it's not even annoying. It's just there, more boring than anything. What this results in is a feeling of emptiness throughout the film; not because of an overload of action, not because of a weak script, but because of Scott's incompetence in communicating the material, and, ultimately, directing it.

Much talk has been made of a third act breakdown. I beg to differ. Here, Scott and co. actually manage to make something of the human element enfused into previously stone-cold material. The over-fleshed backstories of protagonist and antagonist, as well as the overlong chit-chats between them, finally attain some sense of meaning. In other words, I actually cared about the characters again. Their final showdown benefits from its simplicity, something which 123 fails to learn from Joseph Sargent's original.

Without David Shire's picture-perfect score, without the racist/sexist New York sensibility, without the nobody-persona of Walter Matthau and the stone-cold Robert Shaw, The Taking of Pelham is reduced—from a modern perspective—to nothing more than yet another Die Hard rip-off. I actually felt bored and detached around the halfway point, and considering the by-the-minutes plot and Tony Scott's feverish attempts to keep me excited, this is a most noteworthy concern. In the end, The Taking of Pelham 123 is frustrating because while there's nothing particularly bastardizing about it, there certainly isn't anything redeeming, either. I said it once I'll say it again; these completely pointless remakes have to stop, and they have to stop now.


*1/2 out of ****

~ Patrick Fryberger