The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

Tony Scott's corybantic, incendiary approbation of rampant nimiety, The Taking of Pelham 123, is at odds with itself and not only because it purports to be, in the words of its TV-ad-cum-action movie conductor, a “re-imagining” of the 1974 Walter Matthau-starring crime drama. Scott's movie is another familiarly skin-deep excursion into human-inspired chaos: a theme-park ride rather than a tense thriller—a feigned supercharged, restless roller coaster, but in actuality one prolonged exercise in cinematic onanism. Tony Scott is in many ways more frustrating than his brother Ridley; the latter lacks an even inchoate panorama of ethnological comprehension, fumbling about in interviews with nonsensical remarks like morally equating the murderous drug kingpin and outstandingly clean policeman who share the stage of American Gangster. Tony—and this is crucial—is by contrast the aspiring painter who lacks the prerequisite patience and poise to fulfill the promise of the canvas. There is, at least, an urgency of vision to Tony's work, and that nearly satisfies, the way an undercooked brownie or refrigerated slice of cheesecake stave off hunger. The nutrients are lacking, and the fear of eating too much of that impels the hand to reach for the fish and vegetables.

There are moments—shots, actually—which taunt the viewer with the periodic flash of fleeting perspicacity. These, alas, are all too little, too insignificant to finally matter. In the hands of the hyper-kinetic, ridiculously fast-cutting Scott, these worthwhile amendments to the portrait are rendered nearly meaningless. Scott's 2004 revenge action thriller Man on Fire occasionally touched upon the spiritual component which should underlay any such saga. As Denzel Washington's violent American almost literally raises hell in Mexico to save a little girl played by Dakota Fanning, Scott sparsely injects shots of Washington's character slowly, irrevocably drowning in an all-consuming pool of water. It is a startling image—and perhaps the only one which remains over five years after seeing that film. The incongruity of the physical is only an infinitesimally-sized component to the image's power: the deeper congruity of Man on Fire's solely resonant theme is what renders the ocular intriguingly impressive. Scott wants to make an occasional comment on his characters—but the shallowness of the enterprise (for which he is chiefly culpable through his mind-numbing visual techniques, though he does tend to work with either uneven or abominable screenplays) undoes him. Almost humorously, Scott pours only more fuel to the fire of his pictures' corroding emptiness, until whatever dramatic purpose was originally afoot has been replaced by Scott's incessant need to call attention to himself. For every sequence which may actually call for whirling, disorienting editing flourishes—such as Brad Pitt's wooing of a complete stranger in mere seconds to allow his boss (Robert Redford) to evaluate him in Spy Game—there are an unknown number which are given the treatment regardless of genuine need.

The Taking of Pelham 123 in Scott's hands features some insightful visual cues, but they are buried under repetitious waves of excessively busy camera movements—often ostensibly manufactured from tying a diminutive camera to the tail of a kitten, human head or hummingbird depending on Scott's whims—as well as needlessly ostentatious lighting, a droning soundtrack and bursts of laughable dialogue. Many routine and static camera pans highlight Denzel Washington's subway command center, which creates the affect of making over half of the film look and feel like a submarine thriller. (J.J. Abrams utilized a similar technique with Star Trek, albeit with greater discipline, and, since that was a naval war film, it worked. That, however, is for a future review.) The entirety of the film almost crushes the few moments of visual wit to be gleaned from the picture, but those few moments are worth detailing.
John Travolta's subway hijacker, “Ryder,” is a demented, loathsome individual who inveighs against the political corruption of America's largest city. Ryder lets Washington's Garber know that he is a Catholic man, and he admonishes Garber for seeing the hostages as innocent—Ryder's Catholicism informs him that no one of this earth is truly innocent. Scott frames Travolta's countenance through the back panel window of the subway, making the small compartment appear like a confessional. This is wholly appropriate considering this is where Ryder gradually, and most reluctantly, begins to confess his sins to the listening Garber. The Taking of Pelham 123 is briefly made into a richly textured ecclesiastical battle between the fallen Catholic and the modern staple of public service, the practical do-gooder. That has almost nothing to do with Brian Helgeland's fundamentally flawed screenplay—which almost always takes natural conversations and quickly makes them yelling matches, in direct, transparent contrast to the icily attenuated battle of wits between Matthau and Robert Shaw from the original film—and almost everything to do with Scott's temporarily arresting motif coupled with the best portion of Travolta's performance, in which he suggests unmitigated self-loathing and black nihilism.

Scott, however, cannot wait to get to the scenes of mayhem; an impertinent, compendious system of title cards flashes before the viewer nearly like electronically-constituted destinations at a terminal, informing of just how much more time exists for the city to abide by Ryder's deadline. Whether it is a high-concept action blockbuster or the latest Austrian art-house cine, too many filmmakers place process over the quintessential core of their films. In the case of supposed artsy “hyperlink” films, too many filmmakers strain to make the construct matter in the richness of irony and little else, and that may be due to today's excessive devotion to irony for irony's sake. With The Taking of Pelham 123, Scott misses the forest for the trees. His interpretation is predictably noise, noise, noise, all becoming faint—sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Tobias A. Schliessler's almost literally nauseating lighting schema tells the tale; like a Spike Lee film, Scott's picture accentuates the horridness of urban life in New York City. Yet while Lee's pictures personally transfer the worst and best elemental matters of the complicated social organism he dissects, Scott's take is muted by sheer exploitation. This is the filmmaker who, in Man on Fire, made Mexico City look like the eighth circle of hell, only to attach one last title card to thank the city, calling it a “special place.” The milieu may differ but New York City is given a shockingly similar faux-medicinal regimen in The Taking of Pelham 123. Throughout the messy narrative, the city is besmirched and ridiculed, only to be held up by the final moments as a kind of insuperable but benign beacon of clout and culture. The pairing of a taxi cab ad and the mayor played by James Gandolfini (the deliciousness of Tony Soprano moving next door to New York City and becoming mayor all too obvious) sticking up for public servant Garber in the final reel leaves a bitter aftertaste of cheap manipulation to ensure that no unsafe dramatic destination is remotely touched.

And how do the performers fare? The perfection of Matthau as the lanky, plain and unlikely hero has been replaced by utter artifice. The connective tissue bridging the fictive and actual worlds in 1974 brightened Joseph Sargent's solid thriller. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Matthau's public servant was a bold stand-in for the paradoxes which animated American life. When meeting a hotshot police inspector, Matthau's Garber is taken aback because the man is black. Matthau's Garber was imperfect and crude; he scoffs at Japanese men and finds them to be a waste of his time. Matthau's close physical approximation of Richard Nixon subconsciously seals the deal: an evidently inadvertent collision between Sargent's finespun world and that of the pained reality of 1974 creates a lasting and worthy meta-comment. Washington, who seems to have mortgaged a portion of his soul to Scott, by contrast, is a poor reflector; adding a paunch to his midsection with loose-fitting pants always threatening to slide downward is insufficient in its meager conviction. When Washington spills a liquid all over himself, the scene screeches and squeals under the strain imposed by Helgeland's cliched game plan. Washington himself seems in on the joke, as is the entire audience: look, it's Denzel, playing this role. The man is too much of a thespian, crying at just the right moment, frowning with determination at his imperious boss, to be taken seriously here. Travolta dials in another villain: he at least is having fun, but aside from a presumptuousness which is intermittently endearing in that twisted way that makes everyone wish they were so crazed, he brings little to the picture that piquantly stings. Robert Shaw's creation surpassed such pedantic movie thuggery.

Scott's Pelham 123 arrives in the aftermath of more national trauma, war and debilitation of the figure of public service, just as Sargent's did. The differences, however, are noteworthy. Sargent's film sought to deeply examine societal stratas, class and racial tensions—without resorting to absurdly over-the-top maneuvering such as having the villain confirm that an Irishman is Irish and an Italian is Italian as in Scott's picture—through the prism of overqualified criminals against public servants working inside a corrupt system. Scott and Helgeland's public servant is himself corrupt, so Pelham, 2009's message seems to be, what goes around is money, what comes around is payback. That, and something that everyone should follow right about now: invest in gold.