The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

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.

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.

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.

I don't think this 1998 remake was too bad, provided you regard it as a straightforward hostage film.

It uses some of the best lines from the original almost verbatim (eg, "A person likes to know how much he's worth", "Do they still have the death penalty in New York" "I've always done my own killing" etc) which is ok, but I can't believe that Mr Blue in the 1998 film would not know the death penalty status in what appears to be his native New York. In the original, the Mr Blue character was clearly British, and might be excused for not knowing the death penalty status in all 50 US states.

But as one other observer observed, the 1998 lacks .... WALLY MATTHAU (and to some extend George Costanza's dad also).

The 74 version could almost have been sold as a comedy, but not this one. It's a straightforward tradesman like version without the wit, irony, pathos and dulcet tones of Wally Matthau

Certainly worth watching if you love the 74 version so you can do a 'compare and contrast'. If you have not watched either, and you only want to see one of them, see the 74 version.

The final scene is worth the wait (in both versions)

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.