Inferno Subterrâneo

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.

Keeping up with the times this 1998 remake of The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three had to change certain things and deliberately changed others. One indisputable fact was that in 1998 the New York City Transit Police had ceased being a separate entity and was now just part of the NYPD. Hence Walter Matthau's character as a Transit Cop would not have existed any longer. For this version Edward James Olmos is not only a regular NYPD detective, but he's a hostage negotiator specialist.

The change out the Transit Police was necessary, but part of what made the first version work so well was Walter Matthau being placed in a situation he wouldn't normally be dealing with. In that version in fact he's shepherding a bunch of Japanese railroad people around the Transit Authority Command Center when the hijacking occurs.

Instead of Jerry Stiller as his partner, Olmos is paired with Lorraine Bracco, certainly women by that time were doing more than administrative work in the NYPD. The mysterious head of the four hijackers is Vincent Donofrio on the other side of the law. We don't know who he is, but he certainly didn't have the air of mystery that soldier of fortune Robert Shaw did in the Seventies. In fact we never really find out anything about Donofrio.

The plot follows pretty much the story in the original version. Since it was shot in Toronto, the streets of New York where a lot of the excitement above ground as the City tries to meet the hijackers deadline is missing from this version.

Seeing Donofrio and Olmos makes me wish for Matthau and Shaw. Maybe the new version that will have Denzel Washington and John Travolta as antagonists will be better.

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.

To begin with, I have to say that i have not seen the original and i have not read the book.

Although the subject was totally new to me, i still didn't like it. Take a classic hijacking story, take out the cops (who barely appear in the film), and you get the story for this movie.

Well this remake has even more things that make it bad. Examples? The bad guys are very very poorly built. We don't get to find out anything about them, about their past, about their plans for the future, about the relationship between them. There is no chemistry between them, they barely talk to each other, they give you the feeling that they just met or that they hate each other. Vincent d'Onofrio gives a fair performance as Mr Blue, but also i have to say i totally disliked the ending-- probably you will do the same.

There are many other bad things going with the movie, but i'll end here. My vote? 3 out of 10.

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.