Fletch's Film Review: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Tony Scott just doesn't know when to leave well enough alone. The True Romance and Top Gun director has what most would consider to be a successful career, both commercially (especially commercially) and critically (hit and miss, but not reviled like Michael Bay), but the 64-year old director seems to be regressing to his teenage years. 11 and eight years ago, respectively, he gave us Enemy of the State and Spy Game, two espionage thrillers; the first one of the paranoid variety, hearkening back to co-star Gene Hackman's 70s classic The Conversation, and the second a more standard-fare mentor-mentee rescue mission. Both were sharply written with strong casts and twists aplenty. (In fact, I think Spy Game is one of the more underrated movies of the last decade - hint hint, Daniel; it shouldn't win any awards, but it's thoroughly engaging and smart, along the lines of Ronin, which was not coincidentally released the same year as Enemy.) However, good as each was, they each demonstrated a little bit too much affection for, well, I wouldn't even call it action, but for "actioning up" non-action scenes, taking simple tasks such as driving a car or flying a helicopter and "jazzing" them up with camera tricks, special effects and overly loud sound effects.

Fast-forward through Man on Fire, Deja Vu, and Domino to this summer's Pelham and we find that Scott is literally drunk and/or in love with these hacky tricks. He takes what it is an interesting, simple premise (the subway hijacker/subway dispatcher relationship) and tarts it up with so much crap that you can't help but hate him for it. There are plenty of these sequences to dislike, from the oddly edited opening credits montage to the 1080 degree (or more) spin-arounds (I'd be shocked if the camera or editing sat still for more than 3 consecutive seconds), but the biggest culprit is easily a delivery of ransom money from a Federal Reserve bank to the subway station. Scott intercuts this race to get the money there a number of times, and each time, you'd swear that an epileptic was holding the camera with a nearly-deaf guy next to him doing the sound. If you'd like to re-create these scenes yourself, it'd be quite simple: get in your car, tune in to a rock/rap fusion station and crank it as loud as it goes, slam the gas and then shake yourself around violently in your driver's seat until you got into an accident. Mission accomplished.

If Scott were a novice and/or unsuccessful filmmaker, I'd be blaming the studio for wanting to spice up what might have felt "too adult" for a summer popcorn movie; but I can't do that - this is a 40+ year filmmaking veteran who has a number of box office hits under his belt. The blame is all his. And the aggravation all mine.

But not yours, since Pelham has inspired me to do yet another installment of Fletch's Stick Figure Synopsis© (contains a big, kind of obvious SPOILER). Enjoy.











Fletch's Film Rating:

"Whatever."


Random Leftover Thoughts:

* It's really not said enough, but John Travolta is really...not a good actor. In Pelham, he's tremendously appealing and likable - he's a fun villain - but the guy is just not believable at being menacing or dangerous. As inferred in the Stick Figures above, I got a sad kick out of the fact that he punctuated just about every one of his lines with "blah blah blah motherf*cker!!" (angrily), as if that made him seem more dangerous or unhinged to the audience. I just kinda thought it made him pathetic.

* Along the same lines...if you know me at all, you know I'm no prude, especially when it comes to language, but the incessant use of the word "f*ck" and its variants was just too much. This is not an "I'm offended by such coarse language!" complaint, it's an "I'm offended by such lazy screenwriting" complaint. Want an example of a movie with excessive F words that worked perfectly? It's called The Big Lebowski.

* The Turturro wave from the helicopter was hilariously awful. On so many levels. The teenager "relationship" is pretty lame, too.

* A small part of me thinks that I will ironically enjoy this tremendously when it hits cable and I watch it 35 times on HBO. That's not a definite, but I'm just warning you (Mrs. Fletch).