Word: pelham
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...This weekend the insider consensus was for something like a three-way tie among The Hangover, Up and the new Denzel Washington-John Travolta subway thriller The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. According to today's estimates, that's how the movies finished - one two three - but The Hangover, at $33.4 million, was a sturdy $3 million ahead of Up and more than $8 million ahead of Pelham...
...reflecting contemporary society, and this poster child for urban dystopia provided the perfect setting. A raft of films - Serpico, Death Wish, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver - navigated that stinky Styx with the expertise of a champion white-water rafter. A lesser but still pertinent entry was The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which starred Robert Shaw as the criminal mastermind and Walter Matthau as the transit detective trying to talk him out of it. Among its many attractions, this was an action movie where the tension is conveyed mainly in phone calls betwen the killer...
...which has the lowest crime rate of any large U.S. city, is the center of another national trauma: the financial crisis. But the subways run so efficiently, and their lurid reputation has retreated so far, that few people complain about anything except the next fare increase. A remake of Pelham One Two Three can duplicate the 1974 film's thriller ingredients: the criminal mastermind, the clock ticking toward certain doom, the runaway train, the ordinary man tapped for a suicidal mission. It just can't locate those conventions in a milieu with any political resonance...
...Actually, the most disconcerting aspect of the new Pelham 1 2 3 is the sight of Washington, the usually impeccable movie hero, sitting at a subway dispatcher's console. The star looks puffy and has a gut you could park a Hummer on. Weighing in at a sedentary 220 lb. (100 kg), he's playing a desk jockey burdened by the usual bureaucratic bull plus a scandal that has put his career in the commode. (In the original film, Matthau rarely rose to anger; he was a weary, wily guy, just doing his job. This time it's personal...
...Hollywood is going to remake a '70s movie, it might as well be Pelham, and it ought to work as competently as this one. But wouldn't it be nice, once in a while, for Hollywood to turn contemporary traumas into vigorous movies instead of hijacking the anxieties of the past...