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Dir. Tony Scott
Rating: 3.5 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
It's a simple thing, really. We don't require much of our cinematic supervillains other than they have a plan that goes beyond something we could have come up with on our own, standing in the office cafeteria line. If, on top of that, they also manage to be believably intelligent, cutthroat and despicable, that's pretty much icing. So, here's your basic problem with casting John Travolta as the aforementioned bad guy: He can't pull off intelligence or believability. In fact, he can't even seem to find the right cadence to say "motherfucker" without sounding vaguely embarrassed, like someone's elderly aunt. In Tony Scott's latest flash-and-trash spectacle, Travolta plays an evil former stockbroker sporting a completely inconspicuous black knit cap, dark glasses, black leather coat and Motörhead moustache -- he's either a would-be perp about to hijack a train, or he's in town for the Frankie Goes to Hollywood reunion tour. After taking over the train with equally ridiculous-looking henchmen in tow, our boy "Ryder" starts a long back-and-forth with the train dispatcher, Walter Garber (Denzel Washington, appearing in his twenty-fifth straight Brothers Scott picture), a simple family man in a bit of hot water himself over a bribery allegation. Ryder's plan involves getting $10 million from the city in exchange for his hostages, but also to freak out the market enough that he becomes fabulously wealthy on fixed assets like gold. As an action film, Pelham doesn't offer terribly much: a bit of Speed here, a dollop of The Negotiator there. Screenwriter Brian Hegeland (Mystic River, Man on Fire) continues his underwhelming ways, clumsily crafting a mano-a-mano sojourn with the subtlety and nuance of a cement mixer on high-rev. Scott's attempts to guss up the lackluster screenplay involve -- as always -- fast/slow film speeds, start-and-stop editing, hand-held shakiness and an ongoing love affair with a swirling camera that dramatically swoops around its subjects even if they're just ordering cream and two sugars -- but it's all to no avail. The other sad refrain? The film is yet another Hollywood remake of a far superior film (starring Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw), continuing the depressing trend of studios pirating their own archives and releasing a product that only cheapens the legacy of the original. Which brings us back to Mr. Travolta -- whose acting chops have been severely overrated ever since Pulp Fiction. Ryder's "master plan," it turns out, involves him walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, trailing an enormous roller-bag of money in tow behind him. In a shocking turn of events, things don't go as smoothly for him as he might have hoped. For a man who just cleared upwards of $300 million, would it have been too much of a splurge to hire a helicopter?
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