A Fun Ride on 'Pelham 1 2 3'

by Brett Parker

A group of armed madmen seize control of a New York subway and demand a high-priced ransom or else they’ll murder every passenger on the train. That’s the set-up up for The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, a remake of the 1974 thriller, and let’s face it, we’ve dealt with a million cinematic scenarios just like this one before. While every genre of film has the ability to surprise, the Hostage movie really does feel like an exhausted premise. It seems like Spike Lee retired the prize with Inside Man.

Yet you shouldn’t count this Hollywood remake out just yet. With the seasoned Tony Scott behind the camera, you can expect plenty of adrenaline and testosterone no matter what kind of plot he’s taking on. And he really doesn’t disappoint this time; he pumps plenty of juice and relevance into this routine material while basking it in his trademark frantic energy. It also helps matters that Denzel Washington and John Travolta, who can be the most compelling of movie stars, take standard roles and bring unexpected angles and weight to them with surprising conviction.

The film opens on a seemingly ordinary day for the New York Transit System. We see the Subway control center where Transit workers can monitor the activity of all trains on a giant computer. Walter Garber (Washington) is working dispatch at the center and notices that the Pelham 1 2 3 train is not following its scheduled path. The computer identifies that it’s veering off into different directions and separating from attached subway cars. Garber radios the train to find out from Motorman Jerry (Gary Basaraba) what’s going on, but instead he hears the threatening voice of a man who calls himself Ryder (Travolta). “This is the guy who’s gonna give the city a run for its money!” he declares with a madman’s glee.

It is discovered that Ryder is the leader of a gang of thugs who’ve forced their way onto the train with guns and taken hostages. They have the subway car stopped in an isolated section of the underground (where internet and phone signals can’t reach) and demand millions of dollars from the city of New York. If the ransom is not delivered within one hour, Ryder will kill a passenger for “every minute it’s late.” The Mayor (James Gandolfini) catches word of this and races to get the ransom paid with the assistance of the NYPD. Meanwhile, Ryder and Garber keep each other in check over the transit radio waves as they try to figure each other out while discovering the startling things they have in common.

Over the past few years, it seems that Tony Scott has really indulged in a frantic style of editing that shows no mercy for subtlety. This style skewered the competence of Man on Fire yet complemented the deranged nature of Domino. With Déjà vu, Scott’s last outing with Washington, he seemed to find an appropriate balance between his kinetic pacing and attentive scenes of peculiar character development. Pelham 1 2 3 further perfects this delicate balance, for Scott has shown he knows when to speed things up and when to slow down for more dramatic moments. His high plot velocity is welcomed this time because it allows the viewer to feel the compressed anxiety of the ransom timeline and the unrelenting tension of a hostage situation. He even puts his playful use of title cards to good use as he maps out the times and locations of this pot-boiling situation. He even adds some gratuitous action excitement by inducing hard-hitting car crashes into the plot as well as a midtown standoff that displays two criminals who really don’t want to go back to prison. In such standard cinematic territory, jolts like these are welcomed with open arms.

In his earlier works, Scott had a knack for expressing peculiar character attention in tough guy action scenarios. Top Gun, for example, was just as interested in the pilot’s egos as it was the aerial photography. Plus most people cherish his cult classic True Romance for its patient scenes of colorful dialogue. What makes his Pelham 1 2 3 remake so special is the way it develops the personalities of Garber and Ryder, savoring their personal flaws and moral ambiguities. The screenplay by Brian Helgeland (the Oscar winner for L.A. Confidential) doesn’t paint them as Good-Evil counterparts but shows how they are both linked by similar shortcomings and were deeply affected by shady details from their pasts. By observing these two, the movie becomes a sly meditation on the moral boundaries we’re willing to cross for personal gain. Both Garber and Ryder have violated serious rules but felt they were justified in seeking what they felt they deserved. These complications spare the dialogue from being less mundane and more unique on ideas of right and wrong.

It’s kind of surprising to see Washington and Travolta work so well in these familiar roles, since we’d expect them to work better the other way around. Washington can display boiling rage like no other while Travolta has a great talent for playing kind everymen. We almost wonder if this movie would work slightly better if these two actors switched roles. But maybe that would’ve been a tad predictable, for most of the film’s fun comes in watching them put their own stamp on unexpected archetypes. Washington put on weight and dialed down his natural smoothness to wonderfully convince us he is a troubled everyman. As an actor who usually walks with confidence through action plots, its fun to watch him play a normal bystander in over his head. Travolta turns his tics and intensity up to the absolute max to channel the maddening rage of his wounded villain. He paints Ryder not so much as mindless evil but a flawed man who was pushed beyond his absolute breaking point and is out for thoughtfully justified revenge. It’s really interesting when you reflect on the presumed journey from who his character was to what he’s become. It’s one of his more convincing villainous turns.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 wisely falls somewhere between a fun action vehicle and a timely thriller of relevance. While it never transcends the level of a fun adrenaline ride, it does evoke some interesting thoughts on our times with details concerning Wall Street and a Bloomberg-like Mayor (Gandolfini has great fun with the role…as so do we). Of course, this is not high concept originality, but in a summer movie season, it’s nice to see a skilled thriller with surprisingly fun performances and more brains in its head than initially anticipated.