Review // THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 - Making movies from the hair down

I'll get this out of the way first: I really don't like the Scott brothers, Tony and Ridley.

I think they make paper-thin, overly-stylized movies for Baby Boomers who've allowed their attention spans to be whittled down by their children's MTV-consumption. They make junky movies that aren't quite junky enough to be truly fun. Ridley Scott is just Michael Bay with Oscars. Tony is just Michael Bay with slightly less imagination. If I had to choose between the two bald, British brothers though, I'd probably pick Tony. Tony Scott at least has an inkling that he's just making movies where cars blowup and then flip 7 times in the air before hitting the ground and blowing up again. I think. Ridley Scott on the other hand is a curmudgeonly A-list prick who puts on airs and thinks he's making prestige pictures, when really he's just making Tony Scott movies with better casts and more money.

In order to clearly gauge the level of pretension of either brother, one must only look as far as their 1-2 punch combo of Ridley's 1985 Legend and Tony's 1986 Top Gun. Both directors snatched up the rising, red-hot Tom Cruise as their lead and made him the dreamboat centre of gooey junk food confections. Top Gun is a retarded gung-homo-erotic cheese fest. Legend is a humorless, self-serious fairytale that plays like a feature-length Coco Chanel perfume ad, complete with slow-motion unicorns bathed in flower pedals raining from the sky. Tony's film shoots for popcorn. Ridley's film shoots for poetry.

I added a new word to the Urban Dictionary.

Word: "Ridleyed"

Definition: to make something overblown, pretentious and clearly begging for praise.

Example: "Mark really Ridleyed that Power Point presentation, eh? Did you see the sun flares he added to the pie graph? And the Middle-Eastern choir music when he revealed the company earnings? What an asshole".

But Ridley Scott made Blade Runner and Alien, surely I like those right? To be honest, neither of those movies made much of an impression on me, both as a child when I first saw them (and arguably should've been more susceptible to their images) and even upon repeat viewings. They just leave me cold.

Tony Scott, much like his brother, also indulges in a completely overblown style, but it usually results in unintentional laughs as opposed to groans and yawns as with Ridley. Revenge with Kevin Costner is a hot-blooded riot. As is Days of Thunder, The Fan and especially Man on Fire. On the plus side, Tony Scott is responsible for The Last Boy Scout and True Romance, although I would probably attribute the success of both of these movies to their scripts by Shane Black and Quentin Tarantino respectively.

With all this Scott brothers background, I carried a considerable amount of baggage into my viewing of The Taking of Pelham 123, a movie I only saw because Swazz Perkins lent me his Blu Ray rental for a night. When I first heard about this remake, it didn't immediately cause the usual violent eye-rolling, partly because its one of the few recent remakes that kinda makes sense, and partly because I don't have any particular affinity for the original film. This isn't like remaking a 2 year-old foreign film or rebooting a comic book origin story that the studio already fucked up the first time. There is an entire generation that has probably never seen or even heard of The Taking of Pelham 123 and it's set up is open-ended enough to bear a reinterpretation. I saw the original a couple of years ago and like I said, it didn't do much for me. There were things I liked about it, Robert Shaw's steely, unwavering villainy for example. But its pacing hasn't survived the ensuing decades. It probably killed in 1974, but I just happened to grow up with the movies that were influenced by it, like Die Hard, so my chances of really taking Pelham to heart were already blown.

I expected Tony Scott to take Pelham's premise--criminal's pull an unlikely heist by holding a subway car hostage--and caffeinate it until it became a manic, jittering blur of jumpcuts and explosions. In fact, on the Special Features (which ended up as the most entertaining thing on the disc) one of the producers describes their approach as "The Taking of Pelham 123 on steroids". So I was a little surprised that this Pelham remake hued so closely to the original and seemed almost bereft of Tony Scott's usual ADD hallmarks. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty hyper-styling, extreme colour filters and slice-and-dice editing. But compared to past Scott films like Domino and Man on Fire, Pelham seems almost muted by comparison.

Probably the most noticeable update the Pelham remake introduces is a generous use of the word "fuck". One of the first lines of dialogue in the movie is somebody saying "Crunchy-fucking fucknuts" which gives you an idea of the level of wit we're dealing with here. From then on, the word "motherfucker" practically becomes a character in the movie. Travolta's bad guy Ryder probably says "motherfucker" 100 times over the course of the movie, and each time he spits it's unconvincing and cringe-worthy. At the same time, "motherfucker" is all Travolta has to cling to as an actor because there's nothing else to this character. In fact, if I had to describe the character of Ryder I would say he is a man who says "motherfucker". A lot. There's nothing else about him that sticks with you. Except maybe his positively ridiculous facial hair and close-cropped head. Travolta's hair, as I came to learn later, is a crucial key to understanding the mind of director Tony Scott. More on that later.

Pelham quickly, but blandly stages its premise. Travolta and his crew hijack a train, making it look pretty damn easy, but not interesting or coherent. Scott doesn't give the audience the thrill of watching a clockwork heist come to fruition. Travolta pretty much just sticks a gun in somebody's face and they have the train. The pictures ingredients soon settle and we're left with Denzel on one side of a radio, Travolta on the other, and a subway car full of hostages. At this point the movie takes on an almost Disaster-movie feel, with a bunch of random strangers collected in a confined space awaiting their fate. Scott briefly flirts with the idea of giving his hostages identities, setting up the typical archetypes in a Business Man, Kid, Tough Guy etc, but he quickly abandons this direction and the hostage characters never end up amounting to anything, just bodies on the line. It's an odd choice given that there's more tension playing out on Denzel's hostage-free side of the radio than there is in the subway car, and that really shouldn't be.

Denzel plays a transit official, an everyman with grey stubbly hair, a worker bee hunched over a computer terminal. He hides his bulk under a baggy shirt and coat. Glasses tell us he's not the principled tough guy he usually plays, just principled. Denzel's acting gameplan here seems to be to pretend that he's not the most righteous human to ever walk the earth, which is as close to Denzel playing against type as we get these days. The dynamic between Denzel and Travolta is explored over the radio, with the two men acting to a disembodied voice. This doesn't take off like it did in Die Hard or the original version, but it is used effectively in one scene, probably the only smart moment in the film. Denzel's character is accused of taking a bribe from a Japanese subway manufacturer. Travolta asks Denzel to cop to it, with the police and his bosses standing around him in the room listening. When Denzel insists that he is innocent, Travolta grabs a young hostage and holds a gun to his head, demanding that he confess to the crime or the innocent kid dies. It's a tense moment and when its over, Denzel's character has been changed in the audiences eyes and the dynamic between him and Travolta momentarily altered. It's a good scene, but like most of the things in this Pelham, it doesn't really go anywhere.

Speaking of things that don't go anywhere, the great James Gandolfini continues to prove that he will probably never again receive a character as rounded and interesting as his Tony Soprano. His voice work in Where The Wild Things Are is as close as he's come. Here he plays the mayor of New York. In the original film, the mayor is a sleazy, self-serving, incompetent asshole. However, Gandolfini's role has been watered down, made more sympathetic for seemingly no purpose or gain to the picture. It's an odd decision, especially since Travolta's character keeps referencing the "motherfuckers" of the city's establishment who he feels threw him under the bus. A truly sleazy mayor would have provided a powder keg of emotions for Travolta's crazed terrorist to play off of, and even more tension once the mayor enters into the negotiations. Instead, Gandolfini's mayor exists only to make a not-at-all startling revelation about who Travolta might've been before becoming a terrorist. It's like the filmmakers didn't have the courage to make Gandolfini unlikable, or perhaps thought turning him into a Hardy Boy for one scene somehow gave him depth. All this despite the fact that politicians have always been one of cinema's most worked-in punching bags. This oversight is just another in a list of missed opportunities that writer Brian Helgeland delivers to Tony Scott to then gussy up and overshoot.

Aside from Travolta's insane miscasting as the murderous villain, Pelham is unfortunately just mediocre, not astoundingly, hilariously bad like I was hoping. But then I watched the Special Features (Harry was still sucking on his bottle so I thought "why not?"). The two featurettes I watched ended up giving me even more insight into the broken process of Tony Scott. In a feature called From the Top Down, we are introduced to Scott's personal hair dresser and on-set hair stylist, Danny Moulding. Moulding is a young douchy Ed Hardy-wear type who spins his scissors and combs like they're six guns or like he's Tom Cruise from Cocktail. He calls himself and "artist" and explains how Scott confers with him on how to visualize his characters... through their hair. The process is that Scott brings a huge amount of character research and information to Moulding and together they decide what the characters will look like from the hair down. The funniest part is that Moulding has almost no hair, sporting cropped, manicured fuzz all over his face and head. Scott has no hair either and both his leads, Denzel and Travolta have their hair clipped down to the same fuzz that Moulding and Scott sport. It seems like Scott subconsciously styled his characters after himself and his young, "hip" Yesman hairdresser was there to fluff his ego. The fact that designing his characters hair is presented as such a crucial step in Scott's directorial process is incredibly telling.

The other Making Of feature offers the rather funny detail about just how much research Tony Scott does before undertaking a film. The producers and actors talk endlessly of Scott's black binders full of his exhaustive research into every aspect of the films world. He even employs a full-time researcher who flies all over the world interviewing subjects and gathering data to ground the movies in reality. Why? Why does Scott feel the need to labour over the reality of his films when he's clearly more interested in exaggeration with hyper-stylized atmospheres and gravity-defying car wrecks? Despite all this supposed research, why do Scott's films feel so contrived, airless and unreal? Who are they trying to kid? Themselves obviously. Scott endlessly researches subway cars and hostage negotiation and puzzles over character haircuts instead of taking a hard look at his script. It's why his Pelham remake has already been forgotten.