The Taking of Pelham 123 (15.)
Directed by Tony Scott.
Starring Denzil Washington, John Travolta, John Torturro, James Gandolfini, Luis Guzman. 106 mins
At one point in this tube train siege drama one of the hostages being held on a dismantled stationary train deep in the heart of the New York subway asks if he might be allowed to urinate. He’s is pointed in the direction of an open train door but once there finds himself unable to go.
I mention this only because I can’t believe this is a situation that would ever affect director Tony Scott. He started with a tinkle with debut movie The Hunger, built up to a gush with breakthrough Top Gun and has been directing a solid stream ever since, from a great height, straight over the audience, while all the time chomping down on a big cigar.
He’s the director the young guns want to emulate. Who wants to be Kubrick stuck away at home all day with the wife and kids when you can bestride the world like Scott, the Alpha Alpha male, doing a half arsed job and having money and all its trappings thrown at you. When you have lived so well, how better to express your Master of the Universe power than remake a favourite of the seventies.
The mistake, and the disservice, here would be to call the 1974 original version a classic. It’s just a very, very good thriller, gritty and straightforward, an airport novel made flesh, done with some care and attention. I try not to hark back to the golden age of cinema but the measure of Hollywood’s decline is not that they don’t turn out Godfathers or Nashvilles any more, but that they cant make proper grown up entertainments.
You can’t help but suspect that there is something pointed about his decision to trash Pelham 123 with his trademark crash bang wallop approach (there is no plan B with Scott); you could compare it to the Chapman Brother defacing the Goya sketches but its more like an invading army defacing and destroying cultural artefacts.
The films opens with a blur of fast pans, freeze frames and saturated colours, all scored to a Jay-Z track, a nightmarish vision of an episode of NYPD Blue direct by Guy Ritchie. Once the film settles down, the mechanics of the plot build up some basic tension but then the film conspires to deprive the audience even of that. When the train operator Garbor, who has been talking and negotiating with the gang's leader Ryder (Travolta) is forced to relinquish the safety of the chair and go down into the tunnel you already know, because he’s played by the star Denzil Washington, that he’s not going to die. But as he makes his way to the chopper the script includes a line that not only reassures the audience that there is absolutely, positively 100% no chance of anything disturbing happening, it also tells them what the last scene of the film will be. The film works under the assumption that the audience is so lily livered, so eager to turn and rebel against anything that is slightly not to their liking, that no element of suspense can be left in the film.
Directed by Tony Scott.
Starring Denzil Washington, John Travolta, John Torturro, James Gandolfini, Luis Guzman. 106 mins
At one point in this tube train siege drama one of the hostages being held on a dismantled stationary train deep in the heart of the New York subway asks if he might be allowed to urinate. He’s is pointed in the direction of an open train door but once there finds himself unable to go.
I mention this only because I can’t believe this is a situation that would ever affect director Tony Scott. He started with a tinkle with debut movie The Hunger, built up to a gush with breakthrough Top Gun and has been directing a solid stream ever since, from a great height, straight over the audience, while all the time chomping down on a big cigar.
He’s the director the young guns want to emulate. Who wants to be Kubrick stuck away at home all day with the wife and kids when you can bestride the world like Scott, the Alpha Alpha male, doing a half arsed job and having money and all its trappings thrown at you. When you have lived so well, how better to express your Master of the Universe power than remake a favourite of the seventies.
The mistake, and the disservice, here would be to call the 1974 original version a classic. It’s just a very, very good thriller, gritty and straightforward, an airport novel made flesh, done with some care and attention. I try not to hark back to the golden age of cinema but the measure of Hollywood’s decline is not that they don’t turn out Godfathers or Nashvilles any more, but that they cant make proper grown up entertainments.
You can’t help but suspect that there is something pointed about his decision to trash Pelham 123 with his trademark crash bang wallop approach (there is no plan B with Scott); you could compare it to the Chapman Brother defacing the Goya sketches but its more like an invading army defacing and destroying cultural artefacts.
The films opens with a blur of fast pans, freeze frames and saturated colours, all scored to a Jay-Z track, a nightmarish vision of an episode of NYPD Blue direct by Guy Ritchie. Once the film settles down, the mechanics of the plot build up some basic tension but then the film conspires to deprive the audience even of that. When the train operator Garbor, who has been talking and negotiating with the gang's leader Ryder (Travolta) is forced to relinquish the safety of the chair and go down into the tunnel you already know, because he’s played by the star Denzil Washington, that he’s not going to die. But as he makes his way to the chopper the script includes a line that not only reassures the audience that there is absolutely, positively 100% no chance of anything disturbing happening, it also tells them what the last scene of the film will be. The film works under the assumption that the audience is so lily livered, so eager to turn and rebel against anything that is slightly not to their liking, that no element of suspense can be left in the film.
