Release Date: June 12, 2009

(out of 4)

Denzel Washington gives us exactly what we expect him to give us and John Travolta hams it up as a trigger-happy villain in "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3," the latest overcooked Tony Scott-directed suspense thriller in which the suspense is whether or not a train-car load of one-dimensional hostages will be spared or not. The city location is New York and the characters are New York stereotypes. Sometimes Scott doesn’t even bother to develop his background characters as far as to making them stereotypes. The hostages for the most case are a cluster of one-note ciphers. Exception to the one teen hostage that has a laptop and a web-cam.

When Travolta’s bad guy Ryder commandeers the lead car on a subway train in the pitch-black tunnel of the opening scenes, and dislodges the lead car from the rest of the train, the film has Ryder and his other three in the crew pull out their automatics and rattle the hell out of the terrified passengers. It’s all done in smothering close-ups and smash-and-grab editing so you never have a full visual intake of how many hostages are involved. We finally learn there are 18 passengers total when Ryder demands that Washington’s transit dispatcher Walter Garber organize a $10 million ransom payoff within an hour. One passenger will be executed every minute past the deadline.

Title cards inform us of how many minutes are left as the clock whittles down. Garber tries to remain diplomatic with Ryder over the transit radio. A hostage negotiator played by John Turturro enters the picture but inevitably reposts Garber to fill-in on radio duties with the madman. James Gandolfini plays the mayor, and despite initial chuckles at the obvious typecasting, is surprisingly given a fully fleshed out character to play – he commands the city treasurer to quickly organize the ransom and goes to bat, so to speak, for Garber (Washington is playing another one of those flawed and tarnished heroes looking for redemption; he’s been accused of taking a bribe on the job). Most of the screen time is devoted to an uneven mix of hot and cold repartee between Ryder and Garber who try to come up with some kind of mock common ground and yet still manage to hit a nerve or two with each other. What bad guys in the movies never understand is that good guys really don’t have that much in common with them as they would lead on.

“Pelham” overdoses though on its exhausting kineticism: endless circling shots, flash pans, hyper-zooms, slow-mo, shaky cam, shuddery frame speeds. Tony Scott, harking back to the ’80s, became defined as the epitome MTV-style filmmaker of his generation. Yet while MTV eventually retracted its excess over the years (somewhat), Scott is one of the few filmmakers left that still adheres to the overkill formula of slicing-and-dicing. For some reason, Washington keeps working with this director (“Déjà vu” and “Man on Fire” are recent partnerships) with increasingly diminishing returns.

As stated before, Washington gives us exactly what we’d expect from him in this hero-with-a-flaw outing. Agile and determined, full of muster to get his assignment done right, but concealing some kind of pain that Washington seems to convey with his usual tight-lipped but voluble dignity. Some moviegoers will never get tired of Washington’s acting. But when he’s done the same thing numerable times before, it prompts you to look to see him in at least a better drawn story. Travolta is having fun with his Ryder villain, but it’s a contradictory character of a disgraced Wall Street guy who is brilliant with numbers but ultimately is a bonafide nutjob. We never understand Ryder’s pathology when he speaks of respect with someone like Garber but hates the inhumanity of New York City as a whole.

Years have passed since I saw the 1974 original of “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” with Walter Matthau as the dispatcher and Robert Shaw as the villain, but I have enough of a residual memory to say that it had palpable suspense and unfolded with game-spirited finesse. The remake definitely has superior digital read outs and tech-gear but what good is any of it if the result is so jarring to the senses? This is a case when old-school filmmaking beats out Dolby Digital-era filmmaking. For sake of straining too hard to make unnecessary improvements, this update also has a contrived showdown on the Manhattan Bridge.