Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

I have never seen the original Taking of Pelham 123 with Walter Mathau, but I'm going to assume it was way better than this stinker starring John Travolta and Denzel Washington. This was directed by Tony Scott, whose previous effort with Denzel resulted in the modern day masterpiece called Man on Fire. Same writer, too! This box office bomb is now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

John Travolta stars as a home-grown terrorist who takes a subway car hostage and threatens to kill everyone on board unless they mayor (played by James Gandolfini) personally forks over ten million dollars within one hour. Denzel Washington plays a dispatcher who gets the call and winds up playing mind games with Travolta while the authorities seek to diffuse the situation before Travolta kills anyone.

Basically, this movie involves two people talking over the radio for about an hour, then there's a couple of car crashes, then there is the inevitable final confrontation. There is hardly any action other than watching Travolta scream his head off. He's good at playing subtle villains but he was way too over the top to make this role work. Denzel plays a kind of nerdy dispatcher with a checkered past, but he doesn't have much to do beside be overly calm while Travolta cusses him out every five minutes.

This movie had more F-words in it that any other movie I can remember. There were hundreds, so much that it became annoying. The first line in the movie - and I really mean the first line of dialogue you hear spoken by a character - has three or four F-bombs. I don't mind profanity so long as it fits into the context of the movie, but in this it's like they were cussing just for the sake of cussing and it did nothing to enhance to dialogue. Although the screenplay was written by the normally reliable Brian Helgeland, I thought the writing here was extremely weak. It was like listening to two punk teenage kids taunt each other in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

The main reason why I disliked this movie was that it made no sense. There were numerous times where the police had an opportunity to take the bad guys out, but they did not act. The last five minutes of the movie are ridiculous in how things played out. The pointless car crash scenes did very little to enhance excitement, and it ended up being a boring movie. Don't even get me started on the laptop webcam and the girlfriend who starts whining at her hostage boyfriend. I can only take so much stupidity.

Bad remakes like The Taking of Pelham 123 just prove that most remakes are a bad idea. Whether it's bringing an old TV show to the big screen or remaking a ‘classic' from decades ago, the new stuff almost never measures up to the source material.

Recommended: No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age