Armed men hijack a New York City subway train, holding the passengers hostage in return for a ransom, and turning an ordinary day's work for dispatcher Walter Garber into a face-off with the mastermind behind the crime.
Saw this one many years ago, probably when it came out on Blu-ray, and decided to give it another watch at random, and... pretty much lined up with from the first go around. Nothing amazing nor has any great twists, but the performances from Washington and Travolta made the movie worth the time. On the downside, as with many of his later films, Tony Scott's choppy direction was a bit annoying. 3.5/5
Having seen (and truly loved) '<a href="https://letterboxd.com/film/unstoppable-2010/" rel="nofollow">Unstoppable</a>', it's impossible not to see 'The Taking of Pelham 123' as a rather pale incarnation of that 2010 flick (which also has Tony Scott as director and Denzel Washington as lead!).
How strange that those two came together to make two very similar movies so close together. In the end, here, there is enough done to separate them, but early on especially I felt like I was watching the same film almost. For the record, that other release is so vastly better than this... so I'd recommend that more if you want a train-centric production from Scott and Washington.
With all that noted, this 2009 film is still a fairly enjoyable 1hr...
Its not really fair comparing this with the much more sophisticated 1974 version of this story as Tony Scott has taken a fairly broad-brush to that template and pretty much re-characterised the whole story. Thats a story about a gang of well organised criminals who plan a daring hijack of a subway train in New York, USA. Their plan is simple enough. They seize one car and then their leader Ryder (John Travolta) demands $10 millions within the hour or the bodies will start mounting up. His contact in the control room is Garber (Denzel Washington) and soon wheels are in motion to get the cash. Whats not so clear, though, is just what the agenda of these criminals is. Its not an excessively large sum of money and we know that Garber is under i...