Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Paynbob It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

randomStuff101 When the director is Tony Scott, you strap in ready to go for a ride. Sadly this film is limited in scope, and doesn't go anywhere worthwhile. Enemy of the State was a great Tony Scott film. Pelham 123 is a thousand times worse. The premise is too simple. There's nothing clever about any of the characters. No plot twists, nothing to think about, and no satisfaction by the end. The bad guy played by Travolta, tries hard to give purpose to his murderous psycho plot, but it doesn't work. The writers struggle to bring anything worthwhile to the screenplay or dialog. No doubt the original book this is based on, is nothing special. The visuals try to make up for the void in the plot, with constant irritating jump cuts and over-saturated "video" effects. This stylistic treatment is overdone. Tony Scott has always used some degree of visual decoration, but this takes it too far. It starts okay, but by the time we reach the halfway point, things have descended into mediocrity and never recover. Just like with Pay Back, the studio should have intervened and re-wrote the second half, saving it from the train wreck which is Pelham 123.

Lola A I was looking forward to this movie for a very long time now and I must say that it was a bit disappointing. The story line is very predictable. One could tell from the beginning that Walter Garber will be the big great hero at the end of the movie. Ryder's character starts to develop in the beginning in the right direction and makes you curious about his reasons for doing what he was doing. It leaves the impression that maybe something personal and emotional, a wrong doing or an injustice has led him to respond in this wrong way. But, in the end the character development takes a complete disappointing turn. Ryder was doing all this because of money. So, overall the very end of the movie can be anticipated. Even the fact that Ryder's plan A will fail and a plan B is needed, is also what one would expect from movies like this. In terms of the message that the movie was trying to convey, I must say that all it got to me was that in the end the bad boys always lose.

amer-ronaldo Last month, I watched Taking the Pelham 123. It's an action movie. The film stars are Denzel Washington and John Travolta.Like the film's name says it is a story about taking the Pelham number 123. The guy is taking over the Pelham and asking for money to release the people in train.John Travolta is acting like Ryder and Denzel Washington like Walter Garber who is employee of MTA. Ryder and Walker built good friendship. The characters are interesting because we found many information and character's history. Dialogue between these characters is amazing because their attitude.In my opinion this is very gripping film, although it is an action movie. Overall, it is a really enjoyable action.

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.