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Travolta, Washington propel ‘Pelham 1 2 3’
The more The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 talked, the better I liked it.
That may seem like a strange thing to say about an action movie, but Tony Scott’s remake of the 1974 subway hijack thriller is one of the few action movies in which the action isn’t so much the point as it is beside the point. In this film, the dialogue is much more enjoyable than any of the chases or shootouts.
Granted, the 1974 film, starring Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw, was more a psychological thriller than a chase movie, and the remake honors that perhaps a little too well. The battle of wills between Denzel Washington and John Travolta is so effective, that when the remake tries to shoehorn in a chase or a fight, it’s usually distracting.
Washington plays Walter Garber, a lifelong subway employee who just happens to be working dispatch when a mastermind who calls himself Ryder (Travolta) hijacks a train and demands $10,000,000, or he’ll start killing one passenger per minute past his deadline.
It’s a great, suspenseful setup, and Scott would seem a natural fit for this story, having handled a similar battle of wills very skillfully in Crimson Tide, his submarine thriller with Washington and Gene Hackman. However, Scott has a reputation for handling action much better than he does drama.
That’s why it’s so surprising that in his Pelham, what happens is the exact opposite. The drama is compelling, but the action scenes are flat and ordinary, and even, I would argue, unnecessary.
Every time the movie cut away from Travolta and Washington to show a shootout or a car crash, my interest level dropped. It didn’t help that Scott too often staged the scenes using slow motion and blur-o-vision that only diminished the drama. Even the action scenes in the preposterous Deja Vu were more imaginatively shot. Here, I didn’t care about the pursuits and guns, I was interested in the verbal sparring between the leads, sharply written by Brian Helgeland.
Washington is less physically active here than in his other movies with Scott, but he’s no less commanding than usual, playing a deeply flawed man who has hero status unwillingly thrust about him. Although he’s a touch hammy at times, Travolta meshes with Washington very well, revealing Ryder to be more than a little unhinged, but also more than a little intelligent and diabolical. John Turturro lends strong support as a hostage negotiator in over his head.
That Scott felt the need to amp up the action is more than understandable in this age of short attention spans when too many people care more about popcorn than plot. Still, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 stays on track most of the way. If the whole movie were as good as Washington and Travolta, it might have been outstanding. As is, Pelham has to settle for solid but unexceptional.
GRADE: B
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