A quick excerpt from my review of Tony Scott's remake of The Taking Of Pelham 123, the full review having just appeared as my weekly column at Showcase:
... It is the antithesis of a standard Tony Scott premise. And Scott, it must be said, seems to have achieved a sort of transcendent desperation with the whole scenario, a desperation that leads him to do inexplicable things with his camera. Things like literally running in circles around James Gandolfini to try and trick the audience into thinking something exciting is happening when really all that's going on is a quiet conversation on a street corner ...
Read the full review here and talk it up in the comments section below.
The trailer inspired me to pick out the Walter Matthau original. Props on that :D
i hate denzel, not a fan of travolta and i despise remakes...so the odds of me seeing this are pretty slim. now, walter matthau is golden so i'll just go ahead and queue this up on the netflix immediately.
I'm not against remakes in general, just against the ones that nobody really needs, cause it can't be done better then in the original.
Pelham is one of these movies.
When I said "The hell with this movie", that was on general principle and I hadn't actually seen it yet.
Now I've seen it - and I'm really glad I didn't pay to see it. Much, much worse than I ever imagined possible. Just chock full of stupid, illogical writing from start to finish. Todd was unbelievably generous in his review of this tripe.
I'll be fair for a moment; Denzel and Gandolfini were adequate, doing the best with what they had to work with. That doesn't matter as it's a film seemingly written and directed by people who'd never set foot in New York, let alone on a subway there. Utterly worthless, Razzie-worthy crap with a disgracefully stupid script that's riddled with nonsensical factual errors that 10 minutes on Google could have fixed. Travolta is especially awful. You're better off with the original. You're better off slamming your balls in a car door, for that matter. F this S. Rent DOMINO instead.