The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

'Pelham' stays on track for almost the entire ride

June 12, 2009|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

Once upon a time, in a land called the early 1970s, New York City was a hole. A bankrupt, dirty, cynical, exhausted sewer of urban blight, light years away from the city's current status as shiny tourist destination. There were movies made about this New York - "Dog Day Afternoon," "The French Connection," "The Out of Towners" - and one of the best, if least remembered, was 1974's "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three," about the hijacking of a subway train and the MTA dispatcher (Walter Matthau) who tries to stop it.

As Matthau was the rumpled, wiseass personification of that long-vanished New York - he had a face like the bottom of a Florsheim shoe - Denzel Washington functions as the soul of the new city in Tony Scott's remake, "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3." His character, Walter Garber, is ethnic and outer borough, decent, flawed, unflappable. He's one of the thousands of men and women who make the giant metropolis run almost in spite of itself, and he understands the weight of that and how, at the end of the day, it's no big deal. Walter anchors this movie like a rock.

By itself, the new "Pelham" is a solid, suspenseful tale all over again, so long as it stays in the subway tunnels and airless offices of the transit department. It expands the cast to include a few new faces and brings on some of our better Noo Yawk genre actors to play them: John Turturro, as a capable hostage negotiator and, gloriously, James Gandolfini, as the mayor. (I'm assuming Steve Buscemi was vacationing out on the Island.)

For all that, "Pelham 1 2 3" is a film conceived and written in Los Angeles and directed by an Englishman, and as soon as it comes up for air, it's about as New York as "Top Gun." That may not matter to you, but it does play the material false. As originally written by novelist John Godey, "Pelham" is a story about a criminal mastermind brought low by a burned-out civil servant just doing his job between the egg creams.

The criminal mastermind, who calls himself Ryder, is played by John Travolta like a dog worrying a large slice of ham. Ryder has taken the 6 Train (it leaves Pelham in the Bronx at 1:23 p.m.) with a trio of accomplices - two (Victor Gojcaj and Robert Vataj) are big and mean, while the third is a disgraced MTA motorman played with ferrety verve by Luis Guzman (it's the old Martin Balsam role from the original, down to the hat). Ryder issues a demand: $10 million in an hour or one passenger dies per minute.