The Taking of Pelham 123

Another Wednesday another screening. This time with the entire WKFTB troop.

We went and saw The Taking of Pelham 123 in Boston yesterday (good looks, Mattyd) which comes out next Friday, June 12.

I was expecting a little more from this, maybe because of the Denzel-Travolta combo, but overall it held up enough to entertain for two hours. Nothing special here, just a standard suspense with a fast pace, chaos-(and vomit-)inducing spinning camera work and plenty of cheesy bad guy lines from Travolta.

At this point, Travolta has almost become a gimmick, a parody of himself kind of like what's happened to Christopher Walken. In this case, Travolta's psycho bag-guy shtick has been done and overdone so many times that it's almost comical to see him trying it again. The persona lost its luster a long time ago, sometime around Broken Arrow or Face Off and Travolta at times looks like he's more in an SNL skit than a drama/suspense.

Denzel, as you might expect, carries the movie as a down-on-his-luck former transportation big shot who under investigation for allegedly taking a bribe was demoted to work the train switchboard that day. And wouldn't you know, it's his train that gets hijacked by Travolta's character.

The few scenes that feature both Denzel and Travolta prove to be the most tense, most likely the reason why I enjoyed the movie more as it went along. John Turturro (Mr. Deeds, Big Labowski, Bronx is Burning) and Luis Guzman (Traffic, John from Cincinnati) have marginal but good roles in the film, however James Gandolfini is pretty unbelievable as the mayor of New York City -- by not fault of his own, I just think at this point he's too typecasted (fake word?) for me; all I can think of is Tony.

Overall I'd give this movie and B and in the continuance of my summer rankings, it now goes, in order of illness: The Hangover, Star Trek, Wolverine, Terminator, Pelham 1 2 3 then Angels and Demons. We aren't going to start reviewing every movie just the ones we get screenings for, since the screenings show early and consist of the bigger name movies.

And since my inbox has been utterly inundated with angry emails, I will return with Movie Friday tomorrow.

--Nick