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This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

The original 1974 version of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, on which this new film from director Tony Scott (Top Gun, Man on Fire) is based, is not exactly remembered as a classic. So why remake it? Or if you must, why not remake it smarter? Instead, 2009’s Pelham is a broad reinterpretation, missing even the limited social nuance embedded within the first film. Louder, faster and burdened by excessive stylistic flourishes, Pelham is the ultimate exercise in irrelevant redundancy.

When Walter Garber (Denzel Washington), a New York City subway dispatcher, woke up, he assumed it was going to be a day like any other. That was right up until the point that heavily armed men hijacked a subway train, holding its passengers hostage. The criminal mastermind behind the hijacking, a man calling himself Ryder (John Travolta), threatens to execute the train’s passengers unless $10 million is delivered within the hour.

Suddenly, the lowly civil servant, caught in the crosshairs of a madman’s demands and a sluggish government bureaucracy, finds that he is the hostages’ only hope for survival. Yet despite a career’s worth of knowledge of the subterranean tunnels where the bad guys are held up, Garber cannot piece together how the thieves plan on escaping from the labyrinthine tunnels now lined with hundreds of cops with itchy trigger fingers.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is a complete waste of both the audience’s time and their intelligence. The film is chalk full of preposterous twists, contrived situations and abandoned plot points. A rat decides to take a bite out of a cop’s leg just as he is about to pull the trigger on a bad guy; the cops figure out who Ryder is (how hard was it — he used his real name!) but do nothing with the information; a passenger’s discarded laptop broadcasts images of the captors but nothing comes from it.

Washington delivers a good performance, but doesn’t he always? Still, the joke that you’d watch the man read the phonebook is very nearly tested here. This everyman who is asked to be a hero isn’t given many opportunities to act heroic. Meanwhile, Travolta chews up the scenery in a way that only the blowhard, unrestrained, over-actor can. His character rants and rails about the inept corruption of the government but Travolta utterly fails to show us a man who cares whether or not he succeeds with his diabolical plan.

I pity director Scott, I truly do. For most of this film, Washington sits at a desk talking into a microphone and Travolta paces the confines of a stalled subway car. How do you keep the audience’s attention? Scott’s answer: never let the camera sit still. It circles this way, then that, then back again. It snaps to close-ups, cuts back and forth, circles the action again and again, screeches to slow motion — it does anything but just sit still. Because if it did, we’d figure out even sooner than we do that The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is a bullying, almost completely artless film, a superfluous venture in every possible way.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.