Linkshoch
Wonderful Movie
Contentar
Best movie of this year hands down!
Maidexpl
Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast
keithdavid-31173
This is a remake of an older film made in the 1070s and judging by other reviews- an improvement. It is an intense ride and both Denzel Washington and John Travolta shine. The late Tony Scott excelled in making certain types of films and this is the kind of film that he was happiest making, as opposed to elder brother Ridley who tends to choose more cerebral fare. Taking of Pelham 123 is a ride you don't wanna miss. Go see it.
suffocatingg
Regular start, promising progression, disappointing ending
inforaza
This is a Crude, Irritating, Ill-Executed, Retarded remake of the original 1974 movie.This stupid movie again proves 2 important things: 1 - Many remakes are not as impressive as the original and 2 – The movies of the 1970s have subtleties that appeal to our minds, in contrast to, the fast-paced,noisy, show-offish, macho movies of today. The taking of the Pelham 123 suffer from the following ills: 1.Crude shot-effects (stuttering frames, image wipes and frantic editing)2.Crude dialogues (excessive use of the F-word which also includes the boy and the girl with laptops expressing love for each together using the F-word in the middle of tense situation)3.Stupid scenes/dialogues (Walter Garber's wife asking him to bring home a gallon of milk during the hostage crisis and the stupid GF of the boy with the laptop asking him to express his love for her in the middle of the hostage crisis)4.No depth in any character 5.No real suspense at all (only noisy dialogues and machismo) 6.Noisy background musicPS: Contact me - inforaza@gmail.com
aramis-112-804880
Just to clear the air: I read the novel before seeing the 1974 version, and found it unfocused and therefore uninteresting. As for the 1974 movie, it was okay but not a flick I ever warmed to. I'm all for remakes from novels, especially when the first versions were dogs.So I came into this "The Taking of Pelham 123" without any prejudices against it.Touted as a post-9/11 version of the story, I was interested in seeing the changes made to the story. It was nicely updated, as it had to be. But I had no sense of characters, only types. In the novel, in the first movie, as poor as they were, they at least had passengers stand out as people, and therefore one could feel for their situations. Not here. And the first movie had actors like Martin Balsam and Robert Shaw, capable of investing their slight roles with characterizations that stood out even in their disguises.The strangest change is in the main characters. Rather than mere cops-and-robbers fare (as in the book and the 1974 movie, where Walter Matthau was the cop tracking down the bad guys who are willing to kill innocents for money, the "good guy" (Denzel Washington) is some sort of dispatcher (not being a New Yorker and never having ridden on a subway, I don't know the proper terminology). And the script, and the characters, keep blurring the lines between the "good guy" and the "bad guy." But whereas Robert Shaw in the original movie (I don't remember what he was in the book) was a mercenary soldier who teamed with a disgruntled and unfairly fired transit. And here is where it gets interesting. The movie makers raised the point of 9/11. On 9/11 New York and Washington were bombed by extremist Islamic terrorists, killing innocents in two cities who had done no worse crime than going to work in the morning. In this version of "Pelham" the lead baddie, who takes over the train and threatens to kill, is a Catholic, who likes to debate a perverted version of Original Sin. He's so philosophic you'd think he'd have boned up on it and got it right (I wonder how Travolta would have liked it if the lead terrorist had been a Scientologist debating a twisted notion of what L. Ron Hubbard said).Not only is the bad guy Catholic, he's also no longer a soldier of fortune teamed up with a disgruntled former worker. The worker unfairly fired by the government is no longer an important part of the story. The leader is a former Wall Street investing bigwig who did time and who is cleverly manipulating the stock market.While protesting that the update is a post 9/11 take on the story Hollywood has managed to plug in their bigotries (Christians, Wall Street types, etc.). Though no expert on the matter, I'm not even sure a devout Christian would be a Wall Street type at all, much less a dishonest one. The whole thing makes sense only in Hollywood.Or in New York, apparently. Living out in the wholesome, fresh-aired, clean countryside I don't enjoy "gritty city" movies. It's hardly an advertisement for New York and it only makes anyone dwelling on the other side of the George Washington Bridge wonder why folks want to live in such a hellhole.
