Anytime you paint a movie in the Tony Scott aesthetic you are going to probably get mixed results. Or at the very least, very different reactions from people. It is not terribly difficult to know you are in a Tony Scott film. He loves stop motion photography, incredibly quick edits, colors that bleed and camera angles better suited for music videos than feature length films. They also seem to always star Denzel Washington these days. I have a pretty high tolerance for his abrasive style of directing, but I do have to be in the mood for it. I have loved some of his movies (True Romance, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State), I have liked some (Top Gun, Deja Vu) and hated a few (Domino, Spy Game), so it is hard for me to pin down an opinion on Mr. Scott. He is a director who has benefited from some great performances from some pretty great actors and in this movie he had two of the biggest: Denzel Washington and John Travolta.
Walter Garber(Washington) is a frumpy man who drops his coffee on himself and seems too intelligent to be a lowly Subway dispatcher. It turns out he is supposed to be the boss, but he is under investigation for taking bribes and has been temporarily demoted. It is under these unfortunate circumstances that Garber ends up a hostage negotiator when one of his trains is taken over by a group of angry men led by a man named Ryder(Travolta). Ryder is a tattooed mess with a love of the word "Motherfucker" and when he says it, no syllable goes unspoken. He is a vile man who does not appear afraid of killing passengers. Ryder wants a few million dollars in exchange for all of the passengers and he will not speak to anyone else. He wants Garber. the mayor of New York (James Gandolfini) is a whiny wimp and is unsure of how to handle the situation and when a hostage negotiator (John Turturo) enters the picture, Ryder really loses his temper. When Ryder turns out to know about who Garber is, people begin to suspect Garber is in on it, but it also might mean somehow, the bad guys have Internet in the Subway. When one of the hostages' webcam comes back on-line, America has streaming visuals of what is going on and the NYPD combined with the transit workers try and figure out who these people are and what they really want.
Painted in that stop motion, bleeding colored aesthetic, "Pelham" is the perfect example of a hit and miss movie. Much of the stop motion photography lends itself to unintentional bursts of silly laughter as Scott tries to manipulate the stakes to make them higher, but instead, it just becomes silly. His color palate does help a movie that takes place in essentially two places: A subway car and the station. There are colors blinking in yellow, orange and red hues that make the bland silver train look more exciting, but in the end, there is only so much you can do with a subway car and Scott would have been a little more wise to just let the car be and really focus on the acting. The hostages are personality deficient for the most part, so we never grow to care about their safety. Scott also does this thing with a map that is silly, where he traces the ransom as it goes through the city, but then he also shows the actual car with the ransom, so we get the trail twice, which is just stupid. The pacing is a bit uneven and all of the supporting characters are annoying, especially John Turturo's hostage negotiator.
That being said, the movie is worth it for Denzel and John. When you have two great actors together, there can be trouble, but there can also be magic. And when you have the two actors in a position where they almost never see each other, it creates an interesting dynamic. One of my favorite examples of this is The Negotiator, where Sam Jackson and Kevin Spacey spend the entire movie apart save for the final 25 minutes or so. They are both magnificent and find a way to play off each other even though they cannot see each other. In "Pelham" it works very well because of how different the actors play their roles. Travolta, who loves playing the villain, is obviously in full scenery chewing mode, relishing every time he gets to swear, scream and point a gun into the face of a hostage. In stark contrast, Washington is quiet and controlled. He is subtle and plays Garber as a man who is always thinking, and always goes through everything in his head before talking. The scenes where Travolta and Washington are on the phone, or the walkie talkies are perfectly balanced because of how different the two guys have decided to play their characters. It also helps for when they meet later to have them be so different and yet both so good at what they are doing.
There is a cool car crash, and the chase at the end is pretty good, but Mr. Tony Scott refuses to just let the movie be and has to follow every good moment with something silly, like John Turturro in a helicopter saluting Denzel Washington. It is the silliest moment in a movie full of those kinds of silly moments. I know what I am getting myself into when I watch a Tony Scott film, but I felt like this one was Tony Scott ramped up, when he had the level of acting that did not need some many tricks. In the end, Scott kind of ruined his own movie by not trusting two of the biggest stars of acting and falling back on his tricks, but in a movie without fighter jets, they just take away from the experience more than they add to it.
Final Grade: C
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