DVD of the week: The Taking of Pelham 123

Due to poor health, we could only get one half of our DVD duo. But as they say, the show must go on. Read ahead to see Ben's thoughts on his DVD of the week!

Tony Scott’s remake of classic 70s thriller The Taking of Pelham 123 hit DVD shelves this week. The drama unfolds in New York City as a subway train is hijacked by armed men and brought to halt in an inaccessible stretch of tunnel. Walter Garber (Denzel Washington), on his desk at the Transport Authority’s control centre, is suddenly thrust into the limelight as the sole contact between lead hijacker Ryder (John Travolta) and the city’s beleaguered mayor and police force. As Ryder begins to back up his demands by murdering hostages one by one, it is left to Garber to play hostage negotiator as he tries to buy his superiors time.

The film started promisingly, taking us straight to the action as shady looking characters board the train. There’s a lot of motion blur and freeze-frame effects which would usually annoy me, but I found they worked quite well in the context of an introduction to the film. We see the train being taken by force, and immediately Washington’s character is introduced as he notices abnormal activity on his section of the subway and makes radio contact with the hijackers. As he is forced by Ryder throughout the crisis to remain in contact and broker his demands to the mayor, this relationship between the two leads is what ties the film together. Sadly, despite some promising early scenes where Ryder uses the internet from on board the train to dig up Garber’s personal secrets and use them as a psychological tool, this personal aspect fizzles out during the film rather than building to climax.

Washington is the best thing about the film, playing the ordinary-guy-turned-hero role to perfection, exuding cool while everyone else loses theirs. Even as his integrity is questioned he remains a very sympathetic character, although the rather predictable nature of his path to heroism did severely try my patience. Travolta, however, provides a fairly weak foil in the role of the criminal genius, mainly due to his failure to show any glimpses of genius whatsoever. He is characterised by random assassinations and the use of "motherfucker", apparently for emphasis, at the end of at least half of his sentences. I understand that the writers were trying to create tension by having a ‘loose cannon’ in control of the situation, but Travolta never managed to pull this off with any conviction, leading ultimately to prolonged tedium for the audience.

From a promising scenario, the film gradually derails (sorry...) in a haze of overelaborate direction and wasted special effects budget (which, judging by the amount of Vaio laptops on display, was seemingly almost entirely funded by Sony.) The camera effects which had made the intro soon began to grate, notably the repeated unnecessary Manhattan fly-bys, and one particularly nauseating shot of the mayor amongst the media circus, where a camera rotated in a tightening circle around his head for well over a minute. A few more product placement millions were splashed out later on in a ‘police cars crash into unwitting taxis’ extravaganza which was at best peripheral to the plot. When will Hollywood directors learn that in films supposedly based on suspense and drama, crashes and explosions will never make up for poor acting and weak character development?

This film promised much, but it ends up a fairly standard and forgettable Hollywood offering. Hampered by its continual sitting on the fence between psychological thriller and all-out action movie, Pelham 123 delivers neither.

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