Here is Tony Scott’s remake of the 1974 film of the same name, except that one had words instead of numbers in the title, and I must say that Mr. Scott had a tough job to update this movie without making it completely ridiculous. The film is about Ryder [John Travolta] who decides to take a group of individuals and take a train hostage in the New York subway system and demand ten million dollars from the city. Walter Garber [Denzel Washington] is the guy who is on the dispatch line at the Metro Control Centre and gets mixed up in this hostage situation.

Let me make it clear before I start that I watched the original film about a month ago because of the trailer for this remake and I loved the original and I thought it was one of the few movies that could do with a great remake. The biggest worries I had for this remake was that that Tony Scott would get lost in showing all the technological differences from 1974 to now that he would miss out on this great thrilling hostage film. I also worried that they would have to make Robert Shaw’s character, played by John Travolta in this film, way too hardcore a villain which is something that wasn’t there in the original movie. Unfortunately both of these fears came true for the entire of the film.

John Travolta turns in one of his worst performances to date, and I thought he hit rock bottom with Wild Hogs. Just like I said above the filmmakers completely missed the point with this villain they made him too hardcore for the movie. But, looking at it objectively they did a few nice changes with the character. When you look at the plan that this guy lays out, which is to grab a train full of passengers and demand a lavish amount of money. However, how does he plan to get out of a tunnel that will obviously be monitored by police and staked out by snipers and stuff so you expect him to end up dead really quickly. And this was the plan in the original film, but in this movie they gave Ryder a deeper plan which made a ton of sense and made the movie a little bit more believable that it could/would happen one day.

Denzel Washington I think was really serviceable in this movie and does Walter Matthau justice here. Forgiving the hilarious line that we heard, and I made tons of fun of, in the trailer “Bring back a gallon of milk!!!” It is so easy, just like with Travolta’s character, to make the character really over the top and a ridiculous hero character like a John McClane. However, the movie kept Garber just the same from the original which was great for me to see watching the movie. You never felt that Denzel was pushing his persona into the character but rather playing this character so that we can get into a good story.

Tony Scott I think was a poor choice for the director of the movie. I got really annoyed with Scott’s need to have these choppy cuts where you would see a helicopter fly in the sky and the shot would be really blurred and a poor frame rate. This added nothing to the movie and I think it would be so much better if it was just a regular shot where we see the copter fly off and then cut to it landing like a regular film. Scott also played up a lot of the use of the police and made them seem really incompetent rather than the original which made them pretty useful.

One character that I think improved exponentially in this remake was the Mayor [James Gandolfini]. I did enjoy the Mayor in the original but Gandolfini really felt like a politician of today, always kissing someone’s ass. Also the movie had the mayor in the middle of a sex scandal which I felt really works for transposing the character into today’s world.

So overall I’d like to call this not a great film, a poor remake, but definitely not a complete failure of a movie. I still think if you haven’t seen it you should go see State of Play, Up or Drag Me To Hell – they are all awesome – but if you love Denzel you may find something to like here.

IMDB says NA

Rotten Tomatoes says 40%

I say 6.0/10