Military Movies - Military Times

Off the rails

“The Taking of Pelham 123” is actually two movies — one in which Denzel Washington, John Turturro and James Gandolfini do their usual engaging work, the other in which John Travolta lets loose his inner cheeseball in an eye-bulging, vein-popping, hambone performance.

This off-key vibe soaks every frame of director Tony Scott’s film, turning it into a pointless remake of the 1974 lost semiclassic starring Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw.

The basic plot, taken from John Godey’s novel, remains the same. Four armed gunmen led by Ryder (Travolta, in a Fu Manchu ’stache and gaudy neck tat) commandeer a New York City subway train, cut loose all but the lead car, park it in a dark tunnel with 18 hostages, and give the city one hour to cough up $10 million, or they’ll kill a hostage each minute.

Subway dispatcher Walter Garber (Washington) is the unlucky schmo on duty who becomes Ryder’s initial contact in the bureaucracy.

The mild-mannered Garber insists that he’s just “a regular guy,” unqualified to deal with such a situation. But between spittle-spewing rants, Ryder takes a liking to Garber, sparking a series of exchanges in which they delve into each other’s heads.

What scant character exposition exists in the film spins out of these scenes. We learn that Garber is under investigation for doing a bad thing for an unselfish reason, while Ryder spent years in jail for doing a bad thing for an entirely selfish reason.

This leads to some minor riffs on comparative crimes and associated punishments. Still, both back stories are quite banal, especially Ryder’s.

As the deadline looms, Garber gets two sidekicks: Turturro as a police hostage negotiator and Gandolfini as the mayor (whom this Brooklynite would vote for in a nanosecond).

Both are welcome additions, but neither has much impact, mainly because Scott makes it virtually impossible for any actor to have an impact in this film.

Scott is a devotee of the Michael Bay school of filmmaking, which is to say: fast, dumb and loud. That can have its charms if done right; here, Scott uses it as a thinly drawn effort to distract viewers from the fact that far less is going on than meets the eye.

His particular forte is the increasingly common — and increasingly annoying — style of quick-cut editing that is so feverishly frenetic, it almost induces epileptic seizures.

Every action film these days features a little of this (thanks, Jason Bourne) — and a little of it goes a very long way. But Scott cranks up with the opening credits sequence and never lets go; his camera swoops and swirls like a drunken pelican even in the static scenes of Garber and Ryder jawing at each other on the radio.

It’s shallow, contrived filmmaking that hits its low point as the deadline clock closes in on zero and the mayor orders $10 million withdrawn from the Federal Reserve in Brooklyn.

The police decide to run the dough into Manhattan in a souped-up cop car with an eight-motorcycle escort, an overheated scene that drags on for 10 siren-screaming, tire-squealing, fender-mashing minutes — all seemingly rigged solely to give the mayor this punch line: “Why didn’t we just use a helicopter?”

That marks the start of the final half-hour, when things fly apart fast as Scott and writer Brian Helgeland sweat to get their two leads face to face.

This calls for Washington to morph into an action hero — another off-kilter touch, not only because his character is so mild-mannered, but also because Washington is, um, quite a bit heftier than he used to be.

It wraps up with an ending as predictable as all that precedes it in a film that simply had no reason to be remade — despite Scott’s hyperventilated efforts to make viewers think otherwise.

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Rated R for violence and language. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.