The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

A cold murderous high jacker with three associates, takes a train and holds it and its passengers hostage, killing one at a time to obtain a large ransom. Based on an earlier film of the same title, which I have not viewed, this TV version suffers a little from modest budgets and a less than sterling cast. Vincent d'Onofrios, as the senior high jacker, a quirky rather wooden actor at best, fleetingly looking like a young Orson Welles, does what he can to provide sinister menace to his role, while Edward James Olmos is not a very impressive substitute for the formidable Walter Matthau. However it is fair to comment this is a reasonable thriller for TV, and the grainy dark underground railway sequences are quite suspenseful. Makes me keen to see the original film.

Although it's been a while since I watched this, I seem to recall enjoying it more than the 4.+ rating it has here. However, I also remember thinking "why?" Aside from some minor updates (the original's $1,000,000 ransom isn't much in 1998; more racial & gender diversity among the main players; the expunging of the Mayor character entirely which served only as comic relief in the original) the movie stuck so closely to the original that I had to wonder "why?" Why remake a great thriller unless you have something new to add? (Cape Fear for instance) While this certainly wasn't a waste of my time, and was in fact an entertaining evening of television, if given the choice, just watch the original. My only guess as to why this was made as it was, is because there are people who refuse to watch anything "old" and thus would rather watch a "new" version with current actors.

One of my all time favorite movies was this movie back in the theatrical version in 1974. This TV version was awful. It was a perfect example of a movie that did not need to be remade. I could not wait for it to end as I was bored silly. There was absolutely no chemistry between the characters. I hope this movie gets "shelved" forever.

What a tedious load of drivel this is. It tries for "suspense", instead it achieves "stilted" and "boring". Almost as if the director was saying "OK, guys, freeze for five more seconds" in almost every scene.

Walter Matthau was great in the original. I saw him as a serious actor, in the original of this one and in "Kill Charlie Varrick" long before today's kids saw him as a "Grumpy Old Man" actor. And he really makes the original movie shine. But I suspect that even he, had he been somehow edited into THIS load of rubbish, could not have saved it.

I've been a super-fan of the original 1974 flick for a very long time. (I grew up in NYC; in fact, I walked through Astor Place where the accident delays delivery of the money, every day on my way to school.) So I was skeptical of a remake - a Canadian remake, set in safe, comfortable Toronto rather than in rough, chaotic NYC! - and when I first saw it, I didn't like it.

But now, almost a quarter of a century later, I'm finding it much more palatable. James Gandolfini does really excellent job playing the Mayor obviously modeled on Rudy Giuliani; every shot of him is fun to see. (One wonders: did he (Gandolfini) really hate his job, or was he just pretending, in order to build up his image in some weird way?)

Don't overlook another very notable member of the cast: Ingrid Veninger, whom fans of the Sci-Fi Channel's amazingly cheesy late-80s fantasy-horror TV-series "Friday the 13th: the series" (which has nothing at all to do with the slasher movies) will remember as "Helen Mackie", the awkward high-school girl who enchants boys with a magical compact and leads them to their deaths. Now, ten years older, she plays a graduate student on the subway.

Just to see these two performances is worth the price of admission. The late-1990s blaring-metal music is also cool, an interesting update from the tough 1970s street-beat from the original.

Certainlly worth seeing once, at least.