The Taking of Pelham 123
It was about a half hour into The Taking of Pelham 123 that I started to ask myself why the movie wasn't working for me. It's not that it was a bad movie, it just wasn't connecting with me. I didn't care about the characters, or what was happening to them. I soon come to the conclusion that screenwriter Brian Helgeland (Man on Fire, Mystic River) did not care about those things either. You could fill half the cast with cardboard cutouts or animatronics, and it would not make a whole lot of difference.
If the title sounds familiar, that's because this is the fourth take on the story that originated as a novel by John Godey, was later adapted into a 1974 film featuring Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw, and was once again adapted into a made-for-TV movie in the late 90s. This time around, we have Denzel Washington and John Travolta in the lead roles. There have been a lot of changes from the original story, but the basic idea's the same. Travolta's a former Wall Street trader who was busted in a scam, sent to prison, and is now out and looking for revenge. He teams up with a small gang of thugs he befriended while he was behind bars, and stages a hostage situation on a subway train. Washington enters the picture as Walter Garber, a subway dispatcher who initially tries to make contact with the train when he sees it has stalled in the middle of the tunnel, and ends up speaking with Travolta's character over the train's radio. We learn that the leader of the criminals is named Ryder, and he demands $10 million from the Mayor of New York (James Gandolfini) in one hour, or else his men and him start killing the hostages.
Sounds like a simple and effective premise for a nail-biting thriller, but Pelham misses the mark. I didn't believe a single thing I was watching. I didn't believe that Washington's Garber character was truly sweating it out as he found himself in over his head being dragged into a hostage situation. Yes, he has the help of a real hostage negotiator (played by John Turturro) in the movie, but he never seems concerned enough, and that hurts the tension. I also didn't believe that Ryder was as smart or as evil as the movie wants us to believe he is. That's because Travolta plays him as a bad caricature of a villain. He screams and bellows, and he has a lot of facial ticks and twitches. But he's not an interesting opponent. It's no secret that both Washington and Travolta are gifted actors with the right roles, but here, they're given little to work with. The characters are supposed to build a strange antagonistic relationship with each other, as they try to get into each other's heads while talking over the radio speaker, but I didn't believe it because the characters are not there or developed in the first place.
The main thing I did not believe, and the thing that hurt the movie for me, is that I did not believe in the innocent people being held hostage on the train. They're treated entirely as a faceless mob, so there's never any tension or reason for us to get nervous when Ryder and his men start waving guns in their faces and threatening them. The closest we get to actual characters amongst the passengers are a cute little boy who needs to use the bathroom at one point, a young man who was having a video chat with his girlfriend on his laptop computer before the situation happened, and manages to film most of his time in captivity without the captors noticing, and a black guy who stands up for the little boy's mom when she is threatened. I don't think it's a spoiler to reveal that the black guy is one of the few passengers who gets killed. After all, he's only fulfilling the age-old Hollywood law that the black character must be one of the first to die in movies of this type. Besides, do you really think they'd kill off the kid or the brave young man secretly videotaping everything?
The movie is directed by Tony Scott, who rose to fame back in the 80s with cheesy action hits like Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop II, and has had more recent hits like Deja Vu and the previously mentioned Man on Fire. Scott is known for his rapid fire and overly stylized editing, and it suits him well sometimes, but seems out of place in Pelham. That's because the action in this movie largely revolves around the two lead characters sitting and talking to each other over a radio communication, or Denzel Washington's character talking to his superiors about what they should do while waiting for the money to arrive. Despite this, Scott still falls back on his standard editing tricks, using sped-up film, slow motion, blur effects, and dramatic freezing of a scene. It seems like overkill here. There's very little actual action to speak of, but that doesn't stop the movie from pretending there is. When the movie does throw some action sequences our way, it's grandly over the top. I especially loved the squad of police cars who careen through the city, ramming into cabs, almost running over people, and practically killing themselves in the process, all so the movie could throw in some impressive stunt shots of cars flipping and colliding into each other. These scenes seem to have been thrown in, and you can almost here Scott saying, "There's too much talking in this movie..."
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