Trouble on the line

Tony Scott's lively, moderately engaging new blockbuster starring John Travolta as the villain and Denzel Washington as the tarnished hero is a remake of Joseph Sargent's 1974 actioner featuring Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau. Both concern a group of ex-cons who commandeer a New York subway train car on the Number 6 (Lexington Avenue) line, holding the passengers hostage for ransom money. In both cases it's a calm MTA hub dispatcher who negotiates with the lead hijacker. The city is supposed to cough up a large sum, a million then and ten million now, and the chief bad guy proves himself willing to carry out his threat to kill a hostage for every minute the delivery's past the 60-minute deadline. If Sargent's movie is a relic of a grimier New York and dated Seventies film-making, Scott's, with its pumped up visual style, obsession with money and financial markets, and somewhat tacky exploitation of the idea of a terrorist scare, is likely to read in future as very much an artifact of our era.

Scott has a tendency to get too kinetic and he threatens to go over the top right away in a blurry, over-edited opening sequence that, however, serves narrative purposes efficiently as it cleverly sets up the hijacking and establishes the personalities of the two principals before the opening credits are even done. Not surprising if you've been to the movies in the past decade or so that here everything is more gonzo -- bigger, louder, faster, more expensive and more technologically complicated, with helicopters buzzing overhead, computer screens large and small flashing a mile a minute, and hundreds of cops and cop cars with a Death Race style rush to get the cash across town from a Federal Reserve building to the track where Travolta's holding his victims. As so often in today's actioners, all-out efforts to get the bad guys are so violent they could easlily cause more casualties (and, as in Will Smith's boorish superhero derring-do in Hitchcock) more property damage than the actual crime. The modern complexity of the NY subway control hub is accurately portrayed, however.

This is a different bad guy. While Shaw was a cool, calculating Brit, Travolta is a very loose canon from Jersey with a prison-tattooed neck and volleys of obscenity-laced anger whose origins, while obscure, seem to trace back to a great and deviously satiated lust for Wall Street wealth. It's an explosive performance full of disturbing and inexplicable venom but little nuance. The dispatch man, however, is cool and collected this time too, as in 1974. Somebody's got to be. Political updating requires a market-savvy rich-guy New York mayor (James Gandolfini, in a good suit), and this one, who disavows doing a Giuliani, gets taken a tiny bit more seriously than the old Pelham mayor, who was stuck at home with a cold.

Sargent 's Pelham captured the tarnished down-and-dirty of its era's NYC, fitting it on an honorable shelf with the likes of The French Connection, Klute, Born to Win, Dog Day Afternoon, The Warriors, and Taxi Driver. It's blaxploitation-style score reminds us this is the area of Quentin Tarantino's inspiration: the crooks' anonymous monikers as Messers Blue, Gray, Green and Brown can't be reused in Brian Helgeland's new script because the device is too famous from the way it was exploited in Reservoir Dogs. These violent wretches wouldn't have time for such niceties anyway. And besides, in the hi-tech era you can't hide and an accidental video feed and free use of databases allows the good guys to identify the two main perps while the crime is in progress.

For all its references to the city and to Brooklyn and Jersey, this reincarnation, by Brit Tony Scott, doesn't do much to capture the feel of New York as the old Pelham does. Much time is spent instead on updated technology. Travolta manages to make wi-fi available down under, and before the heist begins a young passenger called Geo (Alex Kaluzhsky) has already been (somewhat implausibly) engaged in intimate online audio-visual chatting with his girlfriend on his laptop.

Helgeland clunkily injects complexity into the role of Garber (Washington) by making him a self-made man from admin who's been demoted on suspicion of taking a bribe from Japanese train car manufacturers, and there's stagey praying and talk of Catholicism and confessionals. This is (in both versions) a story about a humble operative who manages to save the day when top level guys might have failed. Italian-American Travolta ironically addresses hostage negotiator John Turturro only as "Greaseball," refusing to talk to him. Turturro's supercilious manner makes him impossible to believe as a negotiator; there are plenty more implausibilities added into this more frantic version, along with obtrusive product placements. Nonetheless, perhaps surprisingly, the new movie follows through the basic action plot line to the same finale as the original's.

Compare this to Dog Day Afternoon (for example), that superb vehicle for Al Pacino at his most virtuosic, and you'll see a basic shortcoming of both versions, which goes back to John Godey's source novel. Despite information about hijacker and negotiator, they remain essentially generic, without complex back stories. Above all Travolta's motivation remains unclear. What is he really trying to do? And for all his vitriolic verbiage, does he even care?

Scott is best known for loud fast action movies like Top Gun and blockbuster star vehicles like Crimson Tide (Gene Hackman) and Enemy of the State (Will Smith). But his best job was to shoot faithfully and with panache Tarantino's terrifically enjoyable extravaganza True Romance, including a pre-"Sopranos" Gandolfini in a memorable cameo, not to mention classic turns by Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, even Brad Pitt. For once Scott had a great screenplay and didn't get in its way. Neither writing nor directing in this Pelham remake remotely approaches that level.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.