Dumber, faster, louder, stronger, Tony Scott’s largely dyslexic remaking of “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,” is as aggressively thick-headed, ‘roided-out and chaotic as you’d probably expect, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t say it wasn’t also moderately enjoyable and satisfying in all the simple goals it sets out to achieve.
Crass, frequently ham-fisted and occasionally flat-out intellectually bankrupt, ‘Pelham’ is also as subtle as a dentist performing surgery at a Slayer concert, but hello, this is Tony Scott we’re talking about, what else is new? The fact remains though, that as boorish as much of the framework style is, as your basic thriller it works and less discerning audiences who want a simple story — which says little, but also asks for little in exchange other than to sit back and enjoy the roller-coaster thrill ride — should connect to this one.
The lack of nuance provides accidental hilarity and John Travolta’s Queenie, over-the-top laugh-riot of a madman is fun to watch (also, there’s about four references to anal prison sex, sodomy? Christ). You get the feeling Travolta relishes the chance to just play an unfiltered madman who’s pervasively dropping gratuitous f-bombs left, right and center. Also, he might have just been drunk on freedom because he didn’t have to wear a ridiculous wig (instead opting for ridiculous baldness).
The script, by the fairly solid Brian Helgeland (who wrote the script for Tony Scott’s gonzo “Man on Fire”), while not without its holes — including a ludicrous dangling chad near the end that’s never picked up — is otherwise serviceable, especially the morality play twist that just hits after the end of the first act.
Denzel Washington plays Walter Garber, an everyman subway dispatcher currently demoted pending an internal MTA investigation. It’s a nice breathe of fresh air to see the Academy Award winner finally take on a non-Alpha Male role raging with typical fiery passion or swaggering confidence (the Denzel mode has become as predictable as Pacino’s now laughable bellow). In fact, it’s Denzel in the opposite of a cool-headed superman – Garber is scared, under-confident and the plebeian-in-over-his-head mien feels fresh for once and all the more engaging.
Travolta’s volatile madman Ryder, on the other hand, is a delicious turn of manic outbursts, charismatic humor and of course unintentional laughs. His character is so outrageously psychotic that you may want a little more about how this guy became such a crazy. Well, you’re not going to get it. He’s a thinly sketched cartoon, and one that’s a far cry from the glacially cold and inhuman Ryder played by the late, great Robert Shaw, in TV director Joseph Sargent’s 1974 charming original.
Scott has chosen to implement his whacked-out visual style on ‘Pelham,’ even applying it to the most mundane scenes (the camera deliriously whooshes around Washington in figure eights while he’s sitting at his desk drinking a Diet Coke). There’s that over-cranked/under-cranked, fucked-with-the-shutter-speed look that he’s been cultivating with ever since his 2002 BMW movie, all over this movie. Sometimes it sorta works — for a cross-city sequence he elevates the camera to a Google Earth-style on view, which is cool if you wanna watch Google Earth on amphetamines, and the jarring, “Law & Order”-like titles which count down to the time when Travolta’s character will start killing people is an effective trick we suppose. But most of it is A.D.D-driven, inconsistent and unnecessary — a helicopter flying against the imposing background of New York City is outstanding enough; we don’t need to feel like we’re drifting through a violent time warp too.
The score, too, by Harry Gregson-Williams (who isn’t half bad), oscillates between a series of barely-audible ambient clicks to an extreme-energy-drink, late-’90’s techno rock throb (presumably to get you amped and hyped!). All of this just seems like unnecessary garnish, because as your basic cat-and-mouser, the movie works. Peppered with Peckinpah-ian splashes of violence, the movie does what it needs to do — keeps you intrigued and on the edge of your seat.
While the Jekyll and Hyde duality relationship between Garber and Ryder is way overstated — Travolta seems to take a preternatural liking to Denzel’s character for no good reason other that forcing a connection between them — granted, this does tether that hook of the story engine. It works well enough, but that could just be because the actors are so charming.
Your basic ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances scenario also works because the story demands little. To its credit a few predictable roads they could have gone (an Internet connection and a laptop on the subway doesn’t turn out to be a deus ex machina its telegraphed to be) are tracks they wisely avoid and the morality play is also a surprisingly well-placed touch. It goes to show you that Tony Scott still does have good taste (he produced the amazing “Assassination of Jesse James…” after all), but he just frequently chooses to ignore it, going instead for the zooming, garish, candy-colored and oversized.
Now let’s not bother comparing it to the original 1974 version; there’s really no point. Walter Mathau’s grouchy Joe Schmo is of stratospherically different ilk and more importantly, from a bygone era. This is a modern retelling in the loosest sense, just using the basic premise to tell a modern rock n’ roll version of the same story. It’s like Guns N’ Roses covering a Velvet Underground ballad — you go in knowing there’s going to be a lot of histrionics involved and little shading and contour. Is Scott’s version antithetical to the scrappy, slow-movin’ and idiosyncratic original? Absolutely. But it is 36 years later and there’s really no way an audience today would buy a laid-back version of what is essentially subway terrorism (remember when terrorism wasn’t just synonymous with funnily accented foreigners?).
New York, as you’d imagine, is front and center both as a character that’s both hero and villain. Travolta has a personal vendetta that blames New York for its problems (in many ways the minor valentine to the Big Apple theme seems like a purposeful counterbalance to the unsettling ideas of further attacks on the city — and some have called it full-on hating on New York, but that’s missing the built in conceit by a mile). The problem is that this hatred is so vaguely defined. Travolta’s mercurial clown character loathes New York because it brought him down and his constant barrage of “cesspool” comments harken back to the ’70s version of the film (and sounds like something the Son of Sam would spout). The original was set in the true bombed-out version of the city, but again, this hatred is a device. He needs to blame his crimes (and capture) on something and you can’t have a film about the NY subways without wisely including the city within your purview. In this regard, New Yorkers might enjoy the film all the more, especially the pandering moments which suggest we’re still resilient to all attacks (go figure). Thankfully, there aren’t any gooey, for-god-and-country moments where virtuous New Yorkers stand together (this was a very real, and genuinely queasy, possibility). But there’s a sense that at the bottom of this action murk there’s a story to be told about two men fighting for a cities soul and salvation, though it’s obviously not the filmmakers primary concern.
Also helping bring up the grade is the excellent supporting cast with James Gandolfini being a surprisingly great highlight as the Bloombergian mayor and John Turturro as a wiry hostage negotiator. Their turns (and ones by an underutilized Luis Guzman and Michael Rispoli) are a pleasure to watch and give the film some nice color and relative texture (its also nice to see a NY not dominated by Caucasians; the cast is a true multi-culti melting pot).
What’s really amazing is that the movie still succeeds (relatively) in the face of Scott’s best attempt to derail the picture with his typical overkill of stylistic tricks; a Ritalin-driven visual vocabulary that vomits up stuttering slo-mo, delirious oversaturated colors and clipped, autistic editing all trying to convey tension, fear and discombobulation all at once. (He used to make suspenseful movies with a well-placed angle. Remember “Crimson Tide?” If he made that movie today the submarine would resemble a French discotheque.) Somehow the well-conceived screenplay prevails over a style that makes you want to scream “every movie doesn’t need to look like ‘City of God’!”
This new ‘Pelham’ breaks no new ground, but is thrilling and taut as it needs to be in the right moments, so much so that you’re willing to suspend your disbelief when characters act out of turn (Denzel’s scared civilian musters the courage to behave like an everyman super hero and Gandolfini dashes out of the movie after figuring out Travolta’s mysterious M.O.) or when a fairly substantial subplot is never mentioned again. That’s saying something for its pure pleasure engine.
The fundamentals are all there: rung tension, grab-the-arm-rest thrills, chases, disorienting action, a clever moral dilemma that was not present in the original that humanizes Garber, and a two-man face-off dynamic that would probably work just as well on the stage as in the cinema (and some of it with shades of “Talk Radio” since the two stars verbally duel over their radio communiques for more than half the picture).
Yes, its directed by a madman (do we really expect that the MTA nerve center is a flat-screened videodome that looks like Tom Cruise’s station in “Minority Report”?), but it at least stays on those tracks and returns you to the station relatively unscathed, which is a lot more that you can say about Scott’s remarkably misguided output this decade. [B]