The 2009 Tony Scott Remake The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Tony Scott's The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 opened on June 12, 2009, with Denzel Washington as Walter Garber and John Travolta as the hijacker now named Dennis "Ryder" Ford. Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River) wrote the screenplay, working from John Godey's novel as well as Peter Stone's 1974 script. The film grossed $150.2 million worldwide on a reported $100–110 million budget, opening third for its weekend behind The Hangover and Up. Critical reception was mixed (Rotten Tomatoes 51%); Roger Ebert gave it two and a half stars and noted that the leads lacked the passion the material needed. (wikipedia)
Scott reorganized the protagonist as fallen, not professional
The first and largest change is the protagonist. The 1974 Garber is a Transit Authority lieutenant in good standing — bored, sardonic, and competentb3. The 2009 Walter Garber is a dispatcher who has been demoted to subway-control-booth duty after a bribery investigation. He is not a cop. He is not in charge. He is talking to Ryder from the dispatch chair because he happens to be on shift.
The reorganization rewires the entire structural relationship. The original film's two-approaches arc — institutional negotiation gives way to attentive detectionb18 b31 — depends on Garber being inside the system, with the authority to pull personnel records and walk into suspect apartments. The 2009 Garber has none of that. The film replaces the arc with a personal-redemption story: Garber clears his name by talking the hijacker down. (wikipedia)
Travolta plays the hijacker as a flamboyant grievance
Robert Shaw's Mr. Blue is a disciplined mercenary who treats the operation as a jobb7 b13. The 2009 antagonist, Ryder, is a former Wall Street fund manager who served time after a financial-fraud conviction and is now using the hijacking to manipulate gold prices in revenge against the city. Travolta plays him with a goatee, prison tattoos, and a continuous shouting register.
The redesign moves the antagonist from professional to grievance figure. Ryder talks constantly. He editorializes. He swears in patterns. He delivers monologues about Wall Street and the moral failures of the financial class. Where Shaw's "Pity"b34 is the smallest possible last word — a single syllable delivered flat — Travolta's character has no small lines and no flat register at any point in the film. The Wikipedia summary of the change frames it as a post-9/11 update to the source: the calculating businessman of the novel becomes "an angry, tattooed former Wall Street executive seeking revenge." (wikipedia)
Scott's visual style is the opposite of Sargent's
Joseph Sargent's Pelham is shot in long anamorphic compositions, with available light, no storyboards, and a single camera that moves only when it has to (see Owen Roizman). Tony Scott's Pelham is shot in multiple cameras, with constant lens flares, heavy color grading (cyan-and-orange), and editing that averages a cut every two seconds. The Manhattan it depicts is glossy where the original is gritty, kinetic where the original is patient, scored where the original is sparse.
The contrast in approach is what makes the two films instructive when watched in sequence. The 1974 film's choices — the pre-flashed negative, the inside-the-train staging, the dispatch floor as a real room with a real chain of command — were choices Sargent and Roizman made deliberately to keep the subway hijacking grounded in working New York. Scott's choices are choices in a different vocabulary entirely, with a different goal: the 2009 film wants to feel like a 2009 action film, not like a 1974 procedural.
The remake's reception sharpened the original's reputation
What the 2009 remake accomplished — without intending to — was a comparative test. The audience that watched Scott's version and then watched Sargent's could now see the original's choices as choices rather than as defaults. The patience. The available light. The mayor in his pajamasb12. The unhurried tracking of the personnel-list door-to-door workb37. The sneezeb40a. None of these were available to a filmmaker who started with the premise that the protagonist had to be redeemed and the antagonist had to monologue.
Roger Ebert's 2009 review faulted Scott's film specifically on the chemistry of the leads — he found Washington and Travolta competent but unconvinced of the material — and gave the film two and a half stars. Peter Travers, writing for Rolling Stone, was warmer and gave it three and a half. The aggregate critical posture, captured in the Rotten Tomatoes consensus, was that the remake "suffers under the excesses of Tony Scott's frantic direction" measured against the original. (wikipedia)
What the remake kept
The remake kept the central conceit, the deadline structure, the dispatcher-and-hijacker radio relationship, and the basic suspense architecture of the third act. It cut the color-coded aliases (see The Color-Coded Hijackers), the four-man choreography of the boarding sequence (see The Hijacking (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three)), the mayor in pajamas, the deadman's-feature override (replaced with a more conventional setup), the cold, the sneeze, and the Gesundheit recognition (see The Gesundheit Climax (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three)). Without those elements, the story functions as a generic hostage thriller. With them, it functions as the 1974 film. The contrast is the point.