By Christian Toto - What Would Toto Watch?
Need a clear-cut example of just how movies have changed since the 1970s?
Step right up and rent “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,” the remake of the 1974 thriller out this week on DVD.
The new film replaces craggy-faced Walter Matthau with the handsome Denzel Washington, but more importantly it brims with the sort of flashy camera work and hard-charging music that stand in sharp contrast to the meditative movie making of the ’70s.
“Pelham” also happened to be one of the better thrillers of the past summer, but that’s faint praise considering recent letdowns like “Terminator Salvation” and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.”
“Pelham” 2.0 finds Washington, looking heavier than we’ve ever seen him before, playing Walter Garber, an Everyman subway director who gets dragged into a nightmare scenario.
A charismatic killer named Ryder (John Travolta, sporting a neck tattoo and closely cropped hair) has commandeered a subway train and promises to kill a hostage a minute if he isn’t hand-delivered $10 million dollars and one cent in an hour.
Let the cat and mouse games begin.
The mental battle between Garber and Ryder is the main attraction here, and it’s good enough to make us forgive Hollywood for retooling a classic in the first place.
But the new “Pelham” remains a conflicted creation, a film which brings the requisite New Yawk flavor and character details, but can’t help itself from staging superfluous car crashes.
And while Washington’s character is portrayed as a flawed Average Joe, he eventually becomes your Standard Action Hero just when the screenplay runs out of inspiration.
The film has director Tony Scott’s fingerprints all over it, and that’s rarely a good thing. The “Domino” director can’t stage a single sequence without shaking the camera, monkeying with the film stock or drowning out the drama with overheated music.
Travolta follows Scott’s heavy-handed lead, shouting some of his lines and dropping F-bombs without conviction. The actor maintains such a reservoir of charisma that he still holds the screen with the uber-reliable Washington.
“The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3″ wants to be a gritty thriller and a blockbuster all at once. Only when the film splits the difference does it directly honor the source material.
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