The Taking of Pelham 123 Stays On Track

Every once in a while, a filmmaker and a movie star align like a match made in heaven and team up to make a whole series of great films together. John Ford had John Wayne. Billy Wilder had Jack Lemmon. Alfred Hitchcock had Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. Don Siegel had Clint Eastwood. Akira Kurosawa had Toshiro Mifune. In time, I think Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale and Tony Scott and Denzel Washington should be added to that list. Scott and Denzel have made four movies together—Crimson Tide, Man on Fire, Déjà vu, and now The Taking of Pelham 123—and I’ve been big fans of all of them.

They make exciting, classically constructed, emotionally involving, character-driven action thrillers, a feat all the more rare and needed in the age of mindless, flashy drivel like Transformers and anything Jason Statham is in (not including next year’s The Expendables that Stallone had the charity to give Statham a role in). Pelham is not the best of their collaborations. That title goes to Man on Fire, which I think is one of the greatest action movies and character pieces ever made. In fact, if I had to rank their four films, I’d probably go Man on Fire, Déjà vu, The Taking of Pelham 123, Crimson Tide. Crimson Tide is the most critically respected collaboration they have done (actually, it’s the only critically respected film they’ve done because most critics are morons who consistently snub their noses at action movies no matter how layered the characters and how powerful the performances).

Pelham is designed to work in a way that very few films are these days. It’s set up as a movie star showcase, celebrating the star power of two titans facing off and going toe to toe. The other person in the matchup I’m referring to is of course John Travolta, who people like to dump all over but I’ve always been a fan. I’ll be the first to admit though that Travolta has made a lot of crap and taken questionable roles in the last several years. From about 1994 to 1999 he had an incredible streak. Pulp Fiction, the great fun of Get Shorty and Broken Arrow, Face/Off, which is still the best non-franchise action movie of all time in my book, A Civil Action, Primary Colors, and The General’s Daughter. All are really well made, entertaining movies and Travolta is first rate in all of them. But he’s made pretty much all crap since. Pelham is his best role and movie in years, and reminds us of how delicious he can be as a villain.

I’m sure everyone has seen the trailers for the film. Sony has promoted the hell out of it. Denzel plays Walter Garber, who used to be a big shot in the MTA but has recently been demoted to dispatcher, as he is being investigated for suspicion of taking a bribe. He isn’t a cop or a steadfastly heroic character like Denzel often plays. Garber is just an average joe with a non-fashion model wife who is a little overweight and spills coffee on herself at work. It’s just another day at the office for him until a ruthless ex-con who calls himself Ryder (a tattooed and thoroughly seedy-looking Travolta) takes a subway car hostage deep underground. Garber is, as he calls himself at one point during the film, “just a guy, just a guy on the end of the mic.” It’s sheer bad luck that he was on call that day, though Ryder believes that it was fate. He comes to like Garber so much that he insists on talking and relaying demands only to him, and not the top NYPD hostage negotiator played by John Turturro.

That’s basically how the movie works. For the first two acts, it’s essentially a two-man radio play between Denzel and Travolta. Garber isn’t a SWAT team ace running all over the place, he’s sitting at a desk for most of the movie! It’s a testament to the strength of these two actors that watching Garber and Ryder take it back and forth for most of the movie is so compelling. Denzel brings such an understated, almost dormant charisma to the part which bounces off Travolta’s wildly unpredictable, volatile, and funny psychopath. Key to Ryder is that he isn’t just doing it for money, he wants to take revenge against the city of New York for sending him to prison. He’s a tremendously frightening figure, and there’s a twist to his plan that is really ingenious.
Brian Helgeland wrote the script, and he’s one of the smartest, most talented screenwriters in Hollywood. He makes the film wholly modern, with technology playing a big role in the proceedings, and he also fashions the film so that it essentially takes place in real time, and everything we learn about the characters, we learn through just a few hour period in their lives. But we do learn a lot. We get a lot of seamlessly worked in backstory about both Garber and Ryder.

A lot of people have been criticizing Tony Scott the last few years for being too kinetic with his camerawork and too hard with his edits. He started experimenting like that on Man on Fire, where he shot on reversal stock that he cross processed, in addition to using handcrank cameras to give the film a bleachy, grainy, really saturated look. Normally I hate flash, but Scott did it in that film to actually bring you into the head of Denzel’s character Creasy, to visually express the tumultuous, incredibly emotionally unstable psychology that Creasy was going through, and to show how unpredictable and explosive and dangerous Mexico City is.. And he continues to work that way today, trying to find ways to use the camera to bring you into the heads of the characters. I admire that aesthetic goal. Anything that is character based. He’s certainly nowhere near as flashy as Michael Bay or Paul Greengrass. Now I’ll admit that I think he overdid it a bit in Pelham, because Garber as a character is a much more sedentary character than Creasy was. But it’s not like it ruins or even really detracts from the movie.

Another thing Scott always does really well is create a really interesting tapestry of actors. He used to be a painter, and he says that he tries to cast a film in the same way, trying to bring an unusual, eclectic group of actors together that you wouldn’t necessarily expect and see how they bounce off each other. So in addition to Washington and Travolta (and it really is their show), we get interesting performances from Turturro, Luiz Guzman as one of Travolta’s cronies, and James Gandolfini as the Mayor of New York. Gandolfini is great as the fictional successor to Giuliani.

Pelham is a remake of the 1974 film that starred Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw in the roles that Denzel and Travolta tackle here, but it makes several departures. It’s not a retread. It only uses the basic framework of the original. I know a lot of people have reverence for the original, and while I enjoy it, it is a flawed film and it’s very dated today. Scott’s remake isn’t perfect either, there are a couple of plot things that don’t quite add up and it doesn’t bring anything wholly new to the action movie table, but it’s solid and exciting and satisfying, and it’s just great to see an action movie that features top-tier actors and not meatheads. I would watch the film again, just as I continue to rewatch their other collaborations. And the last several shots of Denzel are just great. I hope he and Tony Scott make many more films together.

Check out Tanya’s review here!