Cinema 2009: Leaving Pelham 1 2 3

The sounds of subway trains can be heard briefly during the opening credits in the 2009 remake of "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3," before rap music obliterates that poignant aural touch.

Similarly, the expressionism evident in the cinematography of the early scenes — lights reflected in a man's spectacles, defining him by the career he chose; confining scenes shot through the cloudy glass of a subway car's windows — cedes too quickly to run-of-the-mill images. It is as if director Tony Scott lost interest in the psychological study of greed, violence, and fear, and decided instead to coast on production values and the acting of Denzel Washington, as MTA employee Garber, and John Travolta, as the subway hijacking sociopath Ryder, performances that struggle to gain traction amid the nonsense and routine of an unremarkable so-called Hollywood thriller.

The script does include great detail, but it is the kind of stuff you would expect in a weekly TV show, including plenty of comic-relief one-liners. Writer Brian Helgeland includes a video-chat plotline, which is a good idea when updating a screenplay from 1974. Too bad he forgot to include a coherent middle and ending to his script.

The cops are portrayed as big kids with plenty of fancy toys but not much training. Indeed, what we find here is a hostage situation where vermin in a subway tunnel are calling the shots.

The working class stiffs get short shrift in this remake. They are the victims of ambush or personal failure. While Garber disingenuously refers to himself as "just a guy," we soon learn that he is dispatching only because he is under investigation for having accepted a bribe. In reality, Garber's a big shot — one that broke the rules and the law.

Ryder himself is a rotten apple from Wall Street. It is as good a place as any to find your criminal du jour. But in the 1973 novel, and the original film based on it, the bad guy is a former mercenary.

In Scott's remake there are many quick-cut close-ups. The same repetitive camera movement repeatedly introduces us to Garber at the microphone of his dispatch desk, and that repetition detracts from any dynamic effect.

Lame, too, is the use of Google Earth-type special effects to show the progress of police bringing the ransom money through the city. Call me old school but I want to watch a movie not a website.

A bloody shootout in the middle of midtown is gratuitous. I suggest it would have been more gratifying for the audience to see those perps prostrate on Park Avenue with New York's finest pinning them to the pavement as they slap on the cuffs. That image at least would have alluded to the triumph of the rule of law, something Americans used to claim pride in.

John Turturro is wasted here as the hostage negotiator who doesn't get to negotiate, although the script allows him human touches.

The climax of course pits Ryder against Garber, alone in New York City in the middle of rush hour, while the entire NYPD is looking for the bad guy. Scott draws out that final face-to-face as if something climactic is about to happen. It does not. A couple dialog lines overstuffed with pseudo-philosophy and bang. Heck, we don't even get a splashdown in the East River. That would have at least provided viewers with some well-deserved scenic beauty after more than an hour of cinematic claustrophobia.

As good as Washington is at portraying "just a guy," that portrayal suffers when the script, which has already unmasked Garber as a muckety-muck, later turns him into an action figure who runs down a murderous psychopath with no backup. Afterward, Garber is debriefed by the cops, stroked by the mayor, and turned loose to ride home alone on the subway — with not so much as a counselor, police escort, or hungry reporter in tow. Of course, that particular subway car is also devoid of commuters. It conveys "just a guy" (who occasionally travels to Japan on business), alone with his thoughts after one hell of day at the office.

Joe Sargent directed the original, released in 1974, back when they still spelled out words like "One Two Three."

Cinema 2010: On tracks for disaster

If you like locomotives I hope you find one underneath your Christmas tree. You might also want to screen "Unstoppable" from 2010.

The title of this unimaginatively written action flick turns out to be a somewhat inaccurate description of the massive runaway train the movie is about. In the end, however, perhaps that title alludes to something even greater.

Playing second fiddle to the choo-choo is Oscar winner Denzel Washington, who is Frank, a 28-year veteran of the Pennsylvania railyards assigned here to work with Will (Chris Pine), a well-connected rookie. While Denzel is fun to watch, the star doesn't try to break any new ground here when it comes to acting.

The opening scenes paint a tableau of poorly disciplined workers with even poorer morale. Then there is Frank, a good-humored but demanding senior presence. While Frank lays down his rules for the new guy, in another railroad yard mistakes made and compounded by a hapless worker are setting in motion the impending disaster of a runaway train.

As the ghost train gains momentum with the inevitable smoothness of destiny, elsewhere along the main line Frank and Will get off to a rough start. With the out-of-control train bearing down on them, the protagonists sidetrack their squabble. Later it turns out both Frank and Will are stand-up guys who will respond to an emergency with selfless heroics. By that time it is clear no real harm will come to them as the movie chugs along to its inevitable happy end. Thus the climactic acrobatics and perilous efforts of the heroes atop the speeding train remain devoid of suspense. It is a sharp and disappointing contrast to the latent terror of the opening scenes where an awkward worker tries to climb out of a slowly rolling locomotive to throw a track switch by hand.

In "Unstoppable," reporters and cops swarm the landscape as the mega locomotive smashes its way through rural road crossings like an iron tornado. Director Tony Scott overuses scenes of news reporting to advance and comment on his narrative. Maybe the film's title really refers to a media motormouth who never learned to shut up long enough to let events speak for themselves.

Scott intercuts the action with shots of the heroes' loved ones, but we get it already: the wife wishes she had returned her husband's calls, daughters regret their teenager rebelliousness. Those sappy scenes have their place in such a film but Scott lays it on double-thick.

The only original character in "Unstoppable" is a welder named Ned, played by an original, Lew Temple. (See photo below.) Ned is a blue-collar know-it-all whose diner-counter panacea is precision, and he hammers home that mantra to any waitress in earshot, even while his unabashed enjoyment of the morning's bacon and eggs makes him late for work.

But whenever "Roger that" Ned is onscreen, the audience is being entertained, not least of all by this refreshing performer's ability to steal scenes.

Finally, despite the worn stereotypes offered up here — corporate veeps mismanaging from an isolated boardroom, or the company's owner pausing on the links just long enough to greenlight some cockeyed crisis strategy — "Unstoppable" leaves us with the general impression that beyond the outskirts of Big City America, and in spite of an ever encroaching bureaucratic incompetence and the sad existence of a widely neglected national infrastructure, there still exists a homeland of down-to-earth self-starters.

Though they may be hotheaded and unshaven, those Americans can still answer the call of duty with determination and ingenuity. And no matter how cheesy its ending, this movie would have us go on believing in our American archetypes for one simple reason: they, and by extension we, have hearts big enough to be unstoppable.