June 21st, 2009
‘To remake or not to remake, that is the question’
By Jeff
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three was a crackerjack thriller from 1974 about an NYC transit cop (Walter Matthau) drawn into a cat-and-mouse game with a criminal mastermind (Robert Shaw) holding possession of a crowded subway car for a ransom fee of 1 million dollars (hey, remember, it was a lot back then).
The original Pelham had a respectable workman-like aesthetic to it and an optimally-paced story that ended in a classic moment of perfectly realized absurdity that still brings a smile to my face when I think about it.
It grew into such a cult favorite that a remake was inevitably due. First came a television version in 1998 (I don’t think I have to tell you how that went), and now, it’s back on the big screen.
Directed by Tony Scott (the younger, ADD-riddled, less talented brother of the superior Ridley Scott), The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 sees Denzel Washington play NYC subway dispatcher Walter Garber (a nice throw-back to Mr. Matthau) suddenly engaged on morning in a twisty psychological battle with a subway train hijacker, played considered more unhinged and vehemently by John Travolta, looking particularly bad-ass and oozing a mixture of madman’s menace and relatable irritation at the world (his character’s been through some tough times, which helps evoke some sympathy from the audience – always important).
The leather-clad crook calls himself ‘Ryder’ and is instantly dubbed a ‘terrorist’ by the media, when he’s really just after a quick $10 million in cash from the Federal Reserve Bank.
Travolta brings more to the table than he has in a long time. The man took a massive credibility hit when he did Wild Hogs, and then signed up for the sequel to Wild Hogs, but this movie really does make you remember why you once might have liked him. Denzel, on the other hand, should take a break with these type of roles (this is his 5th film with Tony Scott, and they are all starting to blur together in my head).
The new Pelham starts off generating momentum early on, with Ryder jacking the subway car in the first five minutes, and quickly reaches a steady cruise speed for the first forty minutes which sees Denzel and Travolta share some great back-and-forth dialogue exchanges. All is going well, Denzel and John are fighting an intriguing battle of wits, building their characters more with each new scene, and Tony is uncharacteristically restrained in his directing, keeping the camera steadily locked on the actor’s faces, where all the ‘real’ action is going on.
And then, after an hour in, the movie begins to break apart, as a long, incoherent, and frankly very unoriginal series of chase scenes occur. Character development goes out the window, in favor of gunshots and crashes. The last twenty minutes are probably the worst I’ve seen of a film in quite some time, maybe since The Blair Witch Project (just kidding…kind of).
It’s as though the filmmakers had 2/3s of a meaty script and didn’t know how finish squeezing the juice out of it. There’s no suspense in the end, as there was in the original, it now just beomes about wrapping up with story in as predictable and neat a way as possible. God forbid we want people thinking about the ending when they walk out of the theater.
You can’t entirely blame the producers for attempting the remake. Plenty of other movies are remade for no purpose other than a quick cash-in, but Pelham, with it’s themes of social injustice and monetary necessity, is actually ripe for an update to today’s 21st century world, and could have successfully paid homage to the original while still being it’s own separate entity.
This is not that film though.
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