Conventional plotting, dull hero derail noisy 'Pelham'

A ruthless criminal (John Travolta) takes over a train and threatens to kill its passengers in "The Taking of Pelham 123."

Posted June 11, 2009 11:00 pm

Dann Gire

For all of its visual bombast, Hollywood action stars and updated screenplay by "L.A. Confidential" writer Brian Helgeland, "The Taking of Pelham 123" remains a passionless and shallow crime drama propped up by stilted action sequences and a rock-video style purloined from the 1980s.

Minimal visualist Tony Scott directs "Pelham 123" as a routine Hollywood thriller refashioned from Joseph Sargent's gritty, superior 1974 original starring Walter Matthau as a New York cop trying to stop a subway train hijacker.

At the time, Sargent's movie had been mounted as a sequel of sorts to 1973's "The Laughing Policeman," in which Matthau played a cop on a mass murder case in San Francisco. (A pity that nobody sought to remake that movie first.)

In Scott's turgid redo, Denzel Washington plays Walter Garber, a mild-mannered dispatcher for New York's subway trains. When a ruthless master criminal named Ryder takes over the Pelham 123 train with his personality-challenged cronies (among them Luis Guzman and Victor Gojcaj), he demands $10 million in one hour or he'll start killing the 18 passengers, one every New York minute.

Ryder is played by John Travolta with "Star Trek" sideburns and a raging, over-the-top villainous personality that makes his grandiosely malevolent major from "Broken Arrow" look like Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man.

Travolta usually finds interesting verbal and physical ways to differentiate his characters. Not here. His Ryder is strictly an off-the-shelf Hollywood bad-butt set against Washington's surprisingly lackluster ordinary Joe called on to unconvincingly transform into an overweight version of "Die Hard's" John McClane during the final reel.

Ryder takes a liking to Garber and insists that he handle all the negotiations for the $10 million, much to the chagrin of a New York hostage negotiator (John Turturro).

Meanwhile, the Mayor ("Sopranos" star James Gandolfini in an oddly subdued mode) tries to tread water until the end of his term and sidestep all press questions about his divorce and other personal problems. He treats this hostage crisis as just a petty annoyance.

"Pelham 123" has all the standard ingredients for a taut crime tale, but Scott's visually busy direction - stuffed with speeded-up footage, jump-cuts and other tired gimmicks - clearly is compensating for a noticeable lack of dramatic intensity and character interaction.

The obligatory police car chase sequence to get the money to the station on time (a clever piece of nail-biting filmmaking in the original version) feels forced and mechanical, with the mayor's observation "Why didn't we just use the helicopter?" providing a comic take on the cops' flawed decisions.

Helgeland, in an attempt to give his 2009 remake a relevant makeover, presents Garber as a tarnished transportation administrator demoted to dispatcher after being charged with accepting bribes from a Japanese train manufacturer.

This additional background information adds little to the story or our appreciation of Garber, who, in the story's most ludicrous moment, says he knows nothing about guns.

Yet, he is given one by the only cop in New York unworried about lawsuits stemming from his arming of an untrained man who later races through city streets and waves around a weapon he doesn't know how to use.

Thirty years ago, this hokey, convenient plot device might have been accepted by audiences. In 2009, it evokes a reaction along the lines of "What are you, nuts?"

In 1974's "Pelham," the plot pivoted on the third-act discovery of an undercover cop among the hostages. In the new, unimproved "Pelham," the undercover cop gets bumped off in the first few scenes, leaving us with no surprises, just Scott's witless and noisy affinity for the conventional.

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