John Travolta is a lousy actor. Let’s just be honest about this: I
mean, he has an act, but he’s not acting. He just spits back the shtick
he memorized in Pulp Fiction while quietly praying to Xenu that
no one notices. Plus, in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, he has the
worst douche-stache I’ve seen since the 1970s.
Which brings us to the 1970s, one of the Golden Eras of American
Filmmaking. Directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and
John Cassavetes (all descendents of the glorious Mediterranean peoples)
were in their prime and pumping out stunning material. In their wake
were dozens of films in the “new style:” gritty stories of anti-heroes
and outsiders that explored the consequences of violence and the
capacity of the natural world to provide its own special effects.
Among those films was a well-constructed crime thriller called
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. In it, four very
ordinary-looking and highly professional criminals hijack a New York
City subway car and demand a million dollars in ransom. (A million
dollars was a lot of money back when people had pubic hair.) Over the
course of the film’s 104 minutes, doughy police officer Lt. Garber
(Walter Matthau) carefully sifts through the clues until he can track
down the criminals. There are some violent scenes, but there’s no flash
to them. They’re just brief, brutal and terrifying. The climactic
sequence is quiet, thoughtful and wickedly funny.
Remaking any movie these days involves taking the basic elements and
adding heavy doses of bad-assery. So in director Tony Scott’s Taking
of Pelham 1 2 3 (numbers being way more bad-ass than words), there
are lots of car crashes and machine guns, and the calculating criminals
of the original have been replaced by obnoxious gangsta-wannabes who
like shooting off their guns and razor-cutting their hair.
But the worst thing about the remake (which is actually a decent
lowbrow thriller) is Travolta. It’s not just his hammy acting; it’s the
way the part has been rewritten to allow Travolta to shout and sweat
and jingle his ridiculous earring. Gone is the quiet professionalism of
the original, replaced by a grinding beat in the soundtrack, gimmicky
photography, and the devaluation of violence from tension-inducing plot
point to sheer entertainment spectacle.
Whatever. Pretty much everyone except Hugh Hefner knows that the
1970s are over. Scott, who specializes in stupid, is also a reasonably
adept director who is capable of pacing a movie to keep it interesting.
The plot elements are revealed at carefully spaced moments; there are
lots of twists that at no point violate the internal logic of the film;
and other than Travolta, the acting is superb.
In fact, it’s especially weird to see Travolta up against people
like Denzel Washington and John Turturro. The latter is especially good
as the grim cop, offering a sort of throwback to the acting of the
original film. Turturro isn’t pretty, and he isn’t loud, so he’ll never
be a big hit with those raised on a steady diet of exploding nipple
shots, but he subtly steals every scene he’s in.
Other than Travolta, the most annoying thing about this film is the
cinematography. Every time the camera goes aerial, the images stutter,
which adds nothing to the film except to take the audience out of the
narrative. The underground sequences are all too dark and low-contrast.
If you’re going to shoot in the dark, at least have a few elements in
the scene that stand out. Instead, Scott gives everything a hazy, blue
wash. Heavy doses of style are fine if they actually serve the film,
but Scott uses flashy style for its own sake, ignoring the relation
between cinematographic effect and story. I guess that’s what people
want these days, but if you gave people everything they wanted, then
kids would eat nothing but candy, and we’d match trillion-dollar
deficits with devastating tax cuts.
It’s hard to imagine a world like that. Instead, we have a world
where Tony Scott (and Antoine Fuqua and Michael Bay and McG and lots of
others) encourage people to substitute yelling for acting. Though, to
be fair to Travolta, in this film, the script is full of awful lines
that can pretty much only be shouted.
The ending is also a total letdown, as it swaps out the clever
climax of the original for something heartwarming involving a gallon of
milk. Had it spilled, swelling, manipulative string music would have
informed me that it was time to cry. But, again, this is like
complaining that Cap’n Crunch cereal doesn’t have a subtle mix of
flavors. Tony Scott makes dopey action films. On that count, even
including the shouting and gimmickry and some tacked-on poignancy, I
guess he succeeded. God bless him, really.
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2009.