THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3 – tony scott – 2.9 / 10

Tony Scott’s films have a completely unique look, feel and sound, so much so that by this point in his career he could almost trademark his style: sickly green, yellow and red color palette, abrupt (and random) zooms, pans and changes in film speed and stock, and handheld camerawork featuring lots of close-ups. The shame of it is that this extremely distinctive style isn’t very appealing and is employed in the service of some of the most ardently middlebrow films of the last twenty years (e.g. Man on Fire, Déjà Vu, Domino, Enemy of the State, Days of Thunder, etc.). Scott’s remake of 1974’s The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is no different. If anything, it’s worse. There’s so much wrong with the film, in fact, that cataloguing its failings would probably take longer than actually watching the film.

First and foremost among the film’s many faults is the way it deals with its female characters. There are only four women with speaking roles in the entire film and one of them, the conductor of the subway train hijacked by John Travolta’s Ryder, is gone from the film before giving any indication as to her character. The other three (not counting a couple reporters who yell questions at the mayor) are all reprehensible.

The woman given the most screen time is the wife of Denzel Washington’s Walter Garber who’s given a whopping two scenes, both of which are on the phone (therefore disconnected from every other major character and plotline and thus feeling completely superfluous). She doesn’t care about anyone other than her husband, going so far as to say, when Garber tells her that he’s delivering the ransom money himself because otherwise Ryder will kill a hostage, ‘then someone has to die because you can’t go down there.’ At which point she then goes on and on about how they need milk and Garber should make sure to pick up a gallon before he comes home. She’s keeping him from getting in the helicopter to go save the day because she wants to talk about milk? I can’t imagine that Scott would intend for the audience to hate Denzel’s wife, but if that was the goal, mission accomplished. No wonder the film ends with Garber on his doorstep smiling to himself rather than following him inside to see his wife.

One of the other two female characters is a passenger on the train who, along with her young son, eventually becomes a hostage. She basically does nothing except cower in fear and fail to shield her son from what’s going on around him. That, of course, makes her a terrible mother, and makes me wonder whether or not Scott has kids himself, but it really isn’t reason to indict the film for anti-feminism, just stupidity.

It’s the third ‘major’ female character that really galls. She’s the teenage girlfriend of one of the hostages who, through a video chat that was left open when the gunmen took over the train, gets to watch most of the crisis unfold on her computer. During the occasional stolen moments of conversation between the two of them, this girl harangues her boyfriend into declaring his love for her. She’s so completely self-absorbed and clueless that she uses this most inopportune time to emotionally blackmail her douchebag boyfriend into a (probably false) declaration of love. It’s a moment that, I guess, is supposed to be funny but it’s so crass, tone deaf and insulting that it beggars belief.

Taken together these three characters paint a pretty clear picture of the filmmakers’ attitudes about women. At best, they seem to be saying, women are an annoying distraction and, at worst, they’re clueless, stupid, emotionally needy bitches who have to be placated so that they’ll shut up and leave the men alone.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 doesn’t treat the men of the NYPD much better. The first time they appear on screen, they can’t even park their cars outside the entrance to the subway station without hitting each other. Then, tasked with getting the $10 million ransom from Brooklyn to Midtown in half an hour, they decide to drive it rather than take a helicopter and proceed to crash into enough obstacles that the money is delayed and a hostage is killed as a result. And then, on top of that, one of the ESU snipers accidentally shoots one of the gunmen because a rat in the subway tunnel momentarily startles him. A rat in a New York City subway tunnel? Unheard of.

Eventually, after a lot of back and forth between two guys on microphones (Garber at the MTA headquarters and Ryder in the motorman’s cab of the hijacked train) that Scott heroically tries (and fails) to make interesting by zooming and panning his camera all over the damn place, a couple of supposedly interesting tidbits come to light. See, Garber used to be a bigwig at the MTA and is only working as a dispatcher because he’s under investigation for taking a bribe. (It’s okay, though, because the company that gave him the bribe, a Japanese train manufacturer, really did make the best trains and he was going to recommend the MTA buy them anyway, even if he wasn’t bribed.) And Ryder used to be a stockbroker (before bilking the city pension fund for millions and going to prison) who is using the dramatic stock market drop induced by his terrorist action to make a killing in gold futures (or something).

These pieces of information are supposed to both humanize the adversaries and piggyback on our recent financial troubles in a blatant grab for topicality, but all they really do is muddy the waters. I suppose there are circumstances in which taking a bribe might be acceptable (not that I can imagine any right now) but the one offered here severely taints Garber’s character to the point where the only reason to root for him is because he’s played by Denzel Washington. And the stuff about Ryder being a former stockbroker doesn’t jibe with the only other piece of information we know about him: that he met the rest of his team of gunmen in prison. In what world do white-collar criminals and murderers serve time in the same cellblock? For that matter, I can’t imagine white-collar criminals growing ridiculous facial hair (like Ryder’s Fu Manchu) or giving themselves neck tattoos either.

It should be no surprise by now, after almost three decades of mediocre movies, that the new Tony Scott film isn’t very good. What’s surprising is that there really isn’t anything about it that’s entertaining or interesting. Usually Scott’s films can be counted on to have a bunch of ridiculous stock characters, some borderline racist or misogynist undertones, an annoyingly in your face aesthetic and one or two decent action scenes. If you can get past the silliness of everything else, the action is usually enough to sustain at least one viewing. Not so in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. The action scenes are rote and boring, offering few surprises and nothing that hasn’t been done at least a dozen times before. Add that to all of the other failings of the film and there's really no reason at all to see this one. In fact, if you’ve seen another Tony Scott film, you’ve really already seen this one. Save your money and go see Up again.