“This is New York. We can take it.”
Denzel Washington, The Siege, 1998
So it’s been five years now since the somewhat disappointing The Day After Tomorrow, which was the first major Hollywood film since September 11th to indirectly suggest that it was once again acceptable to destroy New York City in the movies. Now, The Taking of Pelham 123 comes along to not only bring terrorists back to New York, but American terrorists. But make no mistake, this isn’t a terrorist film, it’s a cookie-cutter action thriller taking place on a train, and while it certainly isn’t boring, it would be quite a feat to find a scrap of originality in it.
The movie finds Denzel Washington in the middle of another New York terrorist situation, this time headed by John Travolta, who finds himself in another bad guy role a little too reminiscent of his work in Face/Off and Broken Arrow, both of which are better movies than this. Action fans will enjoy the pace of it, but it’s a good thing that the movie has the star power of Travolta and Washington because it’s about as generic as a train-heist movie can get. Yet amazingly, despite neither of them doing anything new or interesting, Washington and Travolta pull it through and manage to keep you at least entertained if not surprised for mostly the whole running time.
The story – Travolta plays a hostage-taker known only as Ryder. He’s got a dark past and a darker future, but has arranged a team of crack criminals to take over a New York subway train full of passengers to demand a $10 million ransom. Denzel is Walter Garber, a train dispatcher, not a cop, which is exactly the reason that Ryder demands to deal only with him. Complicating matters are a pending criminal bribery case against Garber and some ties with Ryder to a past multi-million dollar robbery and the stock market.
If that’s a little confusing it’s good, because it gives you something to think about while the cliché-ridden action passes you by. There’s nothing original about the movie structurally, but there are some curious new ideas explored in the story department, which lifts the movie out of derivative oblivion and well into the realm of watchability. I was torn between the involuntary exasperation I always feel whenever I see, for example, a police car in a movie crash into another car and do 40 or 50 flips through the air, and relief that the movie – which looks on the outside like a high-class rip-off of Money Train - was actually still not that bad.
Oh, and John Turturro also appears as a clueless police negotiator. I’m no negotiations expert myself, but I’ve always been under the impression that rule #1 in the negotiations handbook was something like “Never say no to the hostage-taker,” so I was a little confused to see that that was the very first thing he did when he arrived. Oh well, you have to get Denzel back onscreen somehow.
Life Lesson #1: Never trust a man with a gun tattooed on the side of his neck.
It’s unfortunate that the lack of originality is such a huge part of the movie, because it really does have a lot going for it. It ultimately comes across like a strange contraption put together by some tinkering machinist using parts of other movies, in everything from Denzel’s and Travolta’s performances, which seem like they could have been put together with stock footage from previous roles, to the horribly clichéd ending, but I would definitely be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. I did, however, enjoy it in the same way that I enjoy watching old action movies from the 80s. They’re fun and entertaining, because I’m watching them to be entertained. If you look for originality here, prepare to be disappointed.
And by the way, The Taking of Pelham 123 is a remake of a 1974 film of the same name, which I highly recommend. It captures the gritty environment of dangerous 1970s New York the way this movie captures airborne police cars. In the original film, Denzel’s character was simply called Lt. Garber, but was changed in the new movie to Walter Garber after the original star, the late Walter Matthau.
