The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Tony Scott, 2009)

Tony Scott's remake lacks any and all suspense (as do nearly all his movies despite his penchant for thrillers), but he also finds a surprising resonance in the material. Blessed with a superbly written script, Scott tones down his usual madness and lets his actors do most of the work. Oh, he still can't help himself at times, but Scott puts his talents toward a sense of visual pacing and structure that uses the battle of wits between Garber (Denzel Washington) and Ryder (John Travolta) to slyly bring out back story and sociopolitical themes.

Travolta hams it up to no end, playing ex-con stock trader Ryder like the demon of Wall Street unleashed below the city, his outrage at serving time for his white collar crimes well-timed to the outrageous entitlement displayed by the real stock brokers who took all kinds of shortcuts to make a fast buck. Garber too is guilty, but we see the disparity between them, greed motivating one and financial desperation the other. Washington and Travolta have the awkward task of playing off each other mainly through long-distance radio communication (an analog take on the potential for meaningful friendships through Internet communication?), but they make for one of the richest hero-villain pairs in years and get across some unexpectedly keen social commentary to boot, even if Travolta oversells it. Supporting players John Turturro (as an arrogant negotiator), James Gandolfini (a scandal-ridden mayor) and Luis Guzman (a former MTA employee nervously helping Ryder) also deliver solid performances.

Scott frames his film with flattened compositions, a beautiful array of neon-lit streaks of blue, red and green, and Scott's "Big Board" fetish realized by the flashing subway map back at Rail Control (a board framed, like all of Scott's giant screens, as a means of both clarifying and abstracting action). Yet despite his usual touches of altered speeds and on-screen text, Scott's aforementioned ease off the throttle shows that his love of visual style does not blind him to seeing and focusing on the great chemistry between Washington and Travolta. In fact, as a movie about a sedentary narrative spruced up by slick, action-oriented direction, I found The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 to be not only more tasteful but more emotionally affecting than Danny Boyle's slick con job 127 Hours.


Sidenote: I don't know if Travolta decided to play Ryder as a flagrant homosexual or that's how the part was written, but if and when he ever comes out of the closet, expect this movie to be gutted for clips on late-night shows. Dressed like he just came from a gay bar, Travolta finds ways to be even more suggestive. Describing a teenage hostage to Garber, Ryder notes his outfit and tangentially throws in "he makes it work" before getting back to the threats. Talking with one of his cohorts about Garber, Ryder bypasses the fact he doesn't know what the man looks like and says, "He's got a good voice, though; he'll be my bitch in prison." Bless his heart; he seems to know he'll never be a star again and at least balances out his usual tat with unorthodox performances in this and Hairspray.

Déjà Vu: You've Never Seen Something Quite Like This Before

My review for Tony Scott's masterpiece, Déjà Vu, is now up at Cinelogue. A digital version of Vertigo, Scott's film probes issues of obsession, fractured identity and time travel, always focusing on the emotion over narrative. It represents the apotheosis of Scott's poetic chaos, taking his complicated, arrhythmic preference for the subjective, stream-of-consciousness close-up and incorporating it into the always-corkscrewing nature of time travel. Plot holes abound, but Scott masterfully controls the aspects of the film he wants to stress most. For all the film's talk of terrorism and its open acknowledgment of such travesties as Oklahoma City, 9/11 and Katrina, Déjà Vu is largely apolitical. Instead, it gives us the alternative to the false closure of revenge: the desire to go back and prevent the whole thing from happening, saving hundreds, maybe thousands, and especially that one person you'd give anything to see again.

Please check out my review at Cinelogue.

Man on Fire

Man on Fire was not Tony Scott's first triumph, having streamlined Quentin Tarantino's script for True Romance into something that actually benefited from outside tampering and scored two solid genre movies with Enemy of the State and Spy Game. But it was his 2004 film that set off Scott's modern reinvention as perhaps the most daring, or at least egregious, talent in American action film. Using a glossy/grainy digital aesthetic, endless in-camera effects in opposition to CGI and and remarkably sensual approach to blockbuster filmmaking, Scott would take the slapdash construction favored by such sloppy directors as Michael Bay and forcibly bend it toward something approaching poetry.

Scott's visual élan explodes from the start, as alternately slow and fast motion film, heavy grain, overexposure and even a fade to black and white gussy up the first images of the film. A scroll of informative text rolls across the screen saying that a kidnapping occurs in Mexico once every 60 seconds. When the text disappears and the frame unfreezes, Scott leaps into pure frenzy, layering overexposed images as cars speed up and shove people into backseats as onlookers scream helplessly. In this moment, the director reveals his biggest stylistic leap, that of deeply subjective filmmaking, rooted in the perspective of agitated people under extreme stress.

American cinema has occasionally posited the idea of a bodyguard hired to watch over children, but usually in a comedic way, playing on the idea that burly-'n'-surly trained mercenary juxtaposed with precocious tykes equals yuks aplenty. Yet as Man on Fire notes, kidnapping has grown to such an epidemic in Mexico that the bourgeoisie there have taken to hiring bodyguards out of necessity. A retired CIA operative, Rayburn (Christopher Walken), invites his old friend John Creasy (Denzel Washington, in the first of his collaborations with the director) to his comfortable estate in Mexico City to offer him such work. Aware that Creasy, a former Recon Marine, has lapsed into alcoholism and despair, Rayburn thinks that a steady job looking after a panicky middle-class family would be a way for Creasy to get his demons under control. Rayburn's even got a job lined up for Creasy to watch the daughter of a businessman (Marc Anthony) who does not particularly fear any kidnapping but wishes to placate his American wife's fears as cheaply as possible.

Scott's muscular but tender approach finds its perfect outlet in Washington, who has been steadily bulking up his entire career as if combating the onset of a paunch years in advance. But he's yet to lose that twinkle in his eye and the disarming power of his smile, and he can still collapse and entire film around him with one good look. Before he mentions his substance issues or chugs a drink, Creasy lets us know of his problems solely through Washington's body language, still mostly erect through rigorous military training but sagging through revulsion, not sloth. Those eyes never seem to look anywhere but inward, and the glimmering chrysalis that encases them suggests Creasy doesn't like what he sees. He takes the job because he has no other options, and his isolated depression makes him a mobile obelisk following around the chirpy, mature-beyond-her-years daughter of Samuel and Lisa, Lupita, or "Pita" for short (Dakota Fanning).

Bravely, Scott devotes nearly a whole hour to Creasy's ingratiation into the Ramos household. This arc follows the expected path -- hardened ex-soldier slowly warms to young girl's charms -- but cliché is only ever unbearable when nothing about it is new, and Scott's inventive framing combines with believable performances from Washington and Fanning to make for a friendly chemistry that practically never exists between child and adult.

Pita, at this point used to having a bodyguard, has the forthrightness of a child mixed with the no-nonsense talk one has with an employee, making her almost unbearably blunt. "Being black, is that a positive or negative in Mexico?" she asks Creasy as he drives her to school. "Time will tell," replies Creasy in that sardonically chipper tone that says he's already fed up with the conversation. Yet the sudden reintroduction of the in-camera effects after the (relative) calm when street people swarm the car in rush hour show that as much as Creasy may not care about her, he still won't let her get hurt, and he's still got his sharp instincts.

Only when a night of heavy drinking leads to a failed suicide attempt does Creasy finally merge those retained instincts with an actual interest in Pita's safety. Scott is brilliant with the suicide sequence, the frame warping and skipping as Creasy stumbles around in despair not unlike Willard at the start of Apocalypse Now. The cuts bewilder in a meaningful way, disorienting as the character is disoriented, occasionally stopping on such minor, beautiful images as whiskey dripping from John's sagging lip. The bullet he places in his gun misfires, and suddenly the frame calms as the experience centers Creasy. Scott isn't just playing around, he's getting at something here, a feeling rather than merely a presentation.

Creasy's epiphany leads him to start living life again, and he warms up to Pita in the usual way, helping her with history homework and awkwardly tiptoeing around the subject of concubines. Scott even devotes considerable time to the unnecessary sideplot of Pita's swim training just to allow her connection with Creasy to deepen. A full 45 minutes into the film, the biggest development in Man on Fire is the swim meet that allows Pita to put all the advice and practice Creasy helped her with into practice. Scott probably could have gotten away with making a film without any explosions or gunfights, so skilled is his ability to make this more human drama so kinetic.

Then, it all changes. Coming out of her piano lesson, Pita is cornered by kidnappers (and colluding cops), and not even Creasy's valiant efforts can prevent her seizure. Severely wounded, Creasy lies in a hospital bed as the police accuse him of murdering two officers and the Ramos family scrambles to retrieve their daughter, using an insurance policy Samuel took out to collect $10 million for a drop-off. But the drop goes awry and the kidnapper's nephew dies, leading the man to tell the family that he will not return Pita. When news of the girl's presumed death reaches Creasy's room, he wrenches himself from his bed and vows to kill anyone who had even the slightest involvement in Pita's kidnapping.

Unfortunately, Man of Fire soon lapses into too typical a revenge fantasy, presenting Creasy as a one-man army tearing his way through Mexico killing all in his path. Even the numerous twists of the narrative do not complicate the film so much as provide clever asides in Creasy's single-minded killing spree. He tortures information out of lackeys as he rises the ladder of a criminal organization, uncovering police corruption and even a more unexpected collaborator.

Scott's modern work is based fundamentally on feelings and moods, not the grandeur of typical blockbuster bombast, yet Man on Fire shows the director trying to fully break from the latter. Thus, the film occasionally shifts between his more intimate style and a larger focus, and the break from visceral immediacy hurts the film. Scott could also have done with some trimming, not, surprisingly, in the 50 minutes of build-up but the repetitive tedium of Creasy's rampage. Where the beginning displayed Scott's élan in such extraneous but delightful moments as the speeding up of the image as Creasy drives through a tunnel or the close-up of the daffodil Pita picked for Creasy situated next to his necklace of St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes (another gift from Pita), the rest of the film spends too much time playing Creasy's sickening bloodlust with a straight face. While the idea of Pita unlocking not only Creasy's humanity but his monstrous past brings up interesting if narrow possibilities, but Scott does not follow up on the potential theme.

Still, not all of Scott's violence here is as simple as it seems, and the more thoughtful approach he'd take to it later peeks through here and there. Pita's kidnapping is one of Scott's greatest sequences, communicating not Creasy's badass cool but his desperate concern for Pita's safety. He may have a steady aim and be seemingly impervious, but that's because his focus is entirely on the girl. The scene climaxes in a beautifully framed moment as a wounded Creasy and corrupt cop shoot each other, the sound cutting out so only Pita's terrified gasp is heard. Too often, though, I found myself pining for Scott's exciting framing of Pita's swim competition instead of the carnage of his his third-act mayhem.

Ultimately, Man on Fire is more coherent than Scott's subsequent Domino and Déjà Vu but lacks the avant-garde invention of those films. It also lacks the more focused narrative-driven tautness of Unstoppable. But the film still shows the major evolution of a director whom no one would suspect of being at the forefront of mainstream innovation. So many little touches, such as Scott's gleeful breaking of the 180^o rule to the incorporation of subtitles into the frame, placing them in the middle and animating them to coincide with the mood -- Lisa's tearful Spanish spoken to the kidnapper is translated in wavy subtitles, while the oft-repeated phrase "I'm just a professional" appears on-screen despite the words always being spoken in English, a motif of self-absolution from those in Creasy's sights. Though it may lack the power of subsequent efforts, Man on Fire still has enough ingenuity to stand out among revenge fantasies, and as much as I continue to feel let down by the brutality, I also continue to find myself moved by the ending, which coalesces the violence back into the sensual feel of the film's first half. There, he gets it all together; later films would show him applying the combined skills in full.

Unstoppable

As I've yet to track down a copy of Déjà Vu on Blu-Ray and would prefer to stick solely to that film's considerable merits, I figure I might as well use Unstoppable as an excuse to make a somewhat shameful cinephile confession: I adore Tony Scott. Not his early, more commercially friendly material, mind you, but the increasing chaos of his second-stage work. His work in the new millennium has placed him in the nebulous, bizarre realm between the gauche incoherence of Michael Bay and the sensualist poetry of Wong Kar-wai. Yes, I said it.

Yet where Bay contents himself to roll around in incompetence, stringing together half-narratives out of weightless ultimatums (there's an asteroid! No more questions!), rapid edits designed to mask the formlessness of his shots and a sickening gauze slopped over the whole proceedings -- to say nothing of his cocktail of racial stereotypes and light misogyny -- Scott's films are more tactile and resonant. Though his narratives of late have been just as abstract as Bay's, Scott infuses his films with a focus on emotion, his own lack of clearly defined structure revealing an elliptical plotting than a futile attempt to outpace his inanity.

Unstoppable, then, may be the film to remind people who fell off the Scott wagon when it hit an elevated rail curve in excess of 75 mph. Befitting a movie about a runaway train, Unstoppable is as linear as the path to which that train is bound. Without the narrative-bending worry of time travel to worry about, Scott can devote his full energies and his host of in-camera effects to jazzing up the CSX 8888 incident that occurred in northwestern Ohio in May 2001. But the changes he makes to further dramatize the story bring out some of his pet topics in recent years.

Scott turns the pre-9/11 incident into a post-9/11 one, updating the event to coincide with our altered perspective. And by changing the setting from Ohio to the even more blatantly post-industrial area of southern Pennsylvania, the director creates a blend of the natural and the manmade, the rural areas through which rails run evoking the nation's past and a more prosperous and adventurous time before running into urban decay, the endpoint of America's Manifest Destiny and the rush to industrialize.

When Will Colson (Chris Pine, looking fresh-faced even with his considerable stubble) arrives at his first day on the rails, he finds older workers who've seen that decay get worse over the years. A table of old-timers grumbles over Will's last name, linking him to the union bosses that surely gave this newbie his job through nepotism. Even without that foot in the door, though, Will and other young men likely would have taken their jobs anyway. It's cheaper to start a bunch of rookie labor at entry salary and let them go before benefits accrue than to keep funding the pensions and modestly larger checks of the vets.

Will partners with Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington), who eyes the young man with the same suspicion his friends cast upon the newcomer. Will, the conductor, may be in charge of the freight train they're running that day, but Frank won't let the slightest error go without comment. A Saturday Night Live sketch spoofed the trailer for the film, playing up the overt hints of bromance and grudging-mutual-respect buddy comedy, and Unstoppable certainly contains that element. After hounding Will's ass all morning, the two bond over familial troubles, Frank with his daughters who work at Hooters and care little for their father's admittedly half-hearted attempts to win them over, Will with his estranged wife.

However, Scott's interest in macho standoffs elevates their chatter over mere pablum. Though his explorations of masculinity have never risen above a sub-Michael Mann level, Scott has a keen eye for surveying how men puff out their chests in front of each other; after all, the men in his films always toughen up and preen themselves when dealing with other men far more than they do to woo a woman. Denzel, with his shaved head removing any gray and maintaining the lingering youth of his bright face, teases, almost flirts, with Pine, that adorable young upstart with the most striking pair of baby blues to come along since Alexis Bledel. Part of the reason I never saw Scott's remake of The Talking of Pelham 123 is that the movie that played in my head -- of Scott using Travolta's butch posturing as a means of messing with that latent homosexuality so many see in the actor -- would likely be more revealing than the actual movie, and Unstoppable adds an age component to the mix, creating a faint paternal bond in addition to the usual bromance.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the freight district, the world's laziest train engineer (Ethan Suplee) has the simple task of moving a massive train loaded with enough cars to make it the length, yes, of the Chrysler Building from one area of the storage yard to another. As he only has to move the thing a bit, Dewey does not bother to tie the air brakes on the train, and when he notices a switch up ahead hasn't been activated, he jumps out of the cab to throw it himself. When he moves to get back on, the throttle slips to full speed and he cannot catch up. So now there's a giant train with no brakes barreling down the rails against incoming traffic. Oh, and did I mention that it's loaded with highly toxic and combustible chemicals?

Scott's in-your-face direction works marvelously here, distracting us from the inevitability of the runaway train coming into contact the other trains we see along the way -- the protagonists', a passenger engine carrying school children ironically there to learn about rail safety. He warps the dimensions, rarely giving us a full look at the locomotive and its cargo to emphasize how massive it is. The screech of metal on metal builds in the sound mix, overwhelming the ears and sounding like the beastly howl of a giant monster. When Frank and Will decide to unhitch their cargo and chase after the train in reverse to hook up to its rear and slow the thing down, Scott avoids the dramatic pitfalls that might come with two objects following the exact same path under constant surveillance by always stressing the pain in the men as they struggle to catch up to the speeding bomb. When they hit top speed and still cannot close in, the mounting sense of panic extends to the audience.

Impressively, Scott uses a bait-and-switch to lure the audience into a much tawdrier brand of suspense picture before moving into something much more complex. The trailers advertised the chemical train on a collision course with the one carrying children, but that particular tragedy is averted early on, shifting the focus away from a cheap, exploitative plot to one that calls more attention to the sociopolitical implications of the story. Back at the station, Connie Hooper (Rosario Dawson), the yardmaster, tries to coordinate efforts but is stymied every step of the way by the corporate higher-ups who prove willing to sacrifice lives before profits. While others calculate the human cost of the train derailing on the sharp elevated curve in Stanton that couldn't possibly handle such a massive train at such a high speed, the executives, personified by the company's vice president (Kevin Dunn), cannot even stop thinking about money when considering worst-case scenarios. Thus, the train itself becomes something of a metaphor for a, wait for it, runaway economy, set in motion by those smart enough to know how the components work but too lazy to do the job thoroughly and with integrity, then perpetuated by those who stood to make the most money off the disaster.

To be honest, though, what caught my eye was the masterful and scathing indictment of the "24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator" as Jon Stewart termed the media in his closing speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity. The use of fake telecasts as a means of communicating plot developments has become increasingly common lately, but Scott plants his tongue firmly in cheek and reveals almost the whole of the film through news. As Dunn's VP and the other executives come up with every more useless measures designed to save money and maybe stop the train too if that would help, the media spends no time trying to get to the truth of their inane actions, accepting a refusal to comment without protest and instead swarming the rail line for coverage. TV station helicopters circle around the train so rapidly and hungrily that one concludes that anyone looking to pilot a chopper for TV news should have military training in advanced flying techniques just to avoid crashing into the other five choppers in the vicinity. Snatches of trite anchor commentary crackles at the edge of the soundtrack as Scott jumps from news footage back to his own look at the action, and we hear fatuous remarks like "That was so crazy!" said with ratings-hungry glee as a man's life is lost in one of the company's abysmal schemes. They sound uncannily like the same pundits who compared night vision footage of the bombing of Baghdad to video games. (I was also particularly amused that Scott made reference to the crutch of news footage as plot device when Dunn throws up his hands in a fit and asks why they can only ever get updates on the train from the news and not their own people.)

Unstoppable may lack the formal daring of Déjà Vu, but it easily ranks among Scott's finest work, a commemoration of post-9/11, average Joe heroism wrapped in the dark comedy of its Ernest Goes to Oklahoma City feel of accidental domestic terrorism. I've wanted to see the film since it came out, but the intervening month has brought a news story that makes the commitment to saving others at the risk of death and lasting injury from toxic fumes all the more apt: I'm speaking of course of the Republican senators voting down health care for 9/11 first responders, denying desperately needed coverage for those suffering complications arising from their acts of selflessness and patriotism. Frank and Will have no reason to risk themselves, the former being edged out to circumvent full retirement benefits, the later brought on solely as cheap labor, but they do it anyway because they would not consider the alternative.

This severity is some of the smartest material to yet appear in a Scott film, but what makes him so endlessly entertaining is that he never devolves into polemics. Fundamentally, Unstoppable has fun with its narrative, taking joy in making vehicles bound to a set route unpredictable. Backup characters like Kevin Corrigan's half-officious, half-amiable safety official and Lew Temple's madman, redneck railroad welder are fantastic and, along with Dawson and Dunn, some rare examples of interesting side players in a Scott film. As for the aesthetics, the washed-out look of muted colors cannot bleach the beauty of his backgrounds, both the forests and the industrial dumps, and they seem even more vibrant when blurred outside the speeding cabs. The only garish element is the yellow safety vest Will wears, which clashes so violently that even Frank demands he take it off in the middle of danger just to avoid insult added to injury.

Scott loves his film grain, and he compounds the hazy look of the movie at the climax by placing a container of actual grain at the back of the runaway train that explodes when the two trains meet, spraying grain over the grain. It's a hilarious, boyish trick that only someone as clever and wry as Scott could pull off in popcorn entertainment, and it's as delightful as any of the more subtle moments in Unstoppable. See it. Otherwise, there will be a hole in your 2010 viewing...the size of the Chrysler Building.