My World of Flops Runaway Lame Case File # 201 The Travolta/Cage Project #86 The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
Forget Battlefield Earth: John Woo could very well be the worst thing to happen to John Travolta as an action star. True, Woo directed what is not only Travolta’s best action movie, but also one of the greatest action movies ever made in 1997’s Face/Off.
But the extraordinary success of Face/Off led to a series of spectacular failures for the Pulp Fiction star. With Broken Arrow and Face/Off, Travolta fell desperately in love with playing bad guys.
Working with Woo didn’t just give Travolta a massive hard-on for villain roles: it made him want to play the hammiest, most theatrical and over-the-top bad guys imaginable.
Alas, the wildly theatrical villainy that helped make Broken Arrow and Face/Off modern day classics almost single-handedly destroys the hopelessly muddled 2009 remake of The Taking of the Pelham 123.
Tony Scott’s feverish re-imagining of the quintessential 1970s New York thriller might have been a decent movie if Travolta hadn’t ruined it with his terrible acting. I write that as someone who loves Travolta so much that he has dedicated years of his life to experiencing every last goddamn movie he’s ever done for the Travolta/Cage podcast and The Travolta/Cage Project.
It’s not at all unusual for Travolta to be terrible in an abysmal motion picture. That’s kind of his thing. It’s the reason Travolta has become synonymous with cinematic failure at its most historic.
Travolta’s Face/Off costar Nicolas Cage is frequently good to great in bad movies but when he’s stuck in an outright dud Travolta tends to sink to the level of his material. That’s unfortunately not the case here: the material is promising but Travolta’s single-handedly destroys the movie with his crazed over-acting.
Suffering through this grievous insult to one of the best films of the 1970s, I put on my editor’s hat and imagined a 65 version of the film that leaves Travolta’s entire career-worst performance on the editing room floor and reins in the jittery, frenetic editing and camerawork and consequently is infinitely superior to the stinker that bombed with critics and audiences alike.
The Taking of the Pelham 123 has a lot of problems. It’s not tense of suspenseful. It perversely discards seemingly everything iconic and unforgettable about the original movie, like giving the bad guys color-coded nicknames (something Quentin Tarantino “borrowed” for Resevoir Dogs) and a legendary final shot.
But the movie’s biggest, most fatal problem is Travolta’s performance. Travolta seems to be in a decidedly different movie than everyone else in the cast.
It’s as if Travolta signed on to make a cheapie Cannon version of this story in the mid-1980s, when his career was at one of its many grim nadirs and he desperately needed money and everyone else is in a respectable, big-budget studio remake written by Oscar-winner Brian Helgeland, directed by Tony Scott and featuring an A-list cast that includes two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington, James Gandolfini (re-teaming with Travolta after Get Shorty, She’s So Lovely, A Civil Action and Lonely Hearts), John Turturro, Luis Guzman and Michael Rispoli.
It feels as if they then took those two very different takes on the material and smashed them together without any concern for the wild tonal shifts that would ensue.
Poor Denzel Washington is weighed down with way too much backstory as Walter Garber, the film’s rock-solid hero. The elegant older man was once a big shot at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority before he was caught taking a bribe.
Garber ends up working as a train dispatcher when a group of heavily armed men led by Dennis 'Ryder' Ford (Travolta) take a subway car hostage and demand ten million dollars within an hour.
Scott actively sought out Travolta for a role he was paid an obscene and unconscionable twenty MILLION dollars to play. Scott presumably wanted the two time Oscar nominee to bring a Face/Off-like theatricality to the outsized role of the most villainous criminal in the history of the universe.
Instead Travolta went full Battlefield Earth on the poor man and the cursed production. He delivers an excruciating performance so comical in its cartoonish evil that it would not be out of place for him to end each malevolent line by cackling “Mwah ha ha!”
A good rule of thumb for Travolta is the worse the hair, the worse the performance/movie. Travolta’s Fun Manchu/long, symmetrical sideburns combination here is an absolute abomination. So is Travolta’s performance.
Metaphorically speaking, Travolta never stops twirling his mustache malevolently as he plays mind games with the dispatcher that inevitably seem to backfire.
The shouting enthusiast with the regrettable neck tattoo never stops inexplicably volunteering information about himself to the crafty Garber. He practically begins sentences with, “Now, as I was saying to my father and mother Steve and Marcia, on my tenth birthday, which was on April 19th, 1968, wait, what was I saying?”
The Taking of Pelham 123 leans way too hard into the hoary old cliche of the criminal and the hero being way more similar than the good guy would like to admit. The Taking of Pelham 123 is deluded enough to imagine that there’s any life left in the cornball conceit that the good guy and the bad guy are two sides of the same coin, mainly by having its big baddie take lip-smacking delight in the knowledge that the hero on the end of the other phone line has committed a very public transgression.
Like so much in this misbegotten motion picture, this seems designed primarily to give Travolta, the twenty million dollar man, more to do when the problem is that John Travolta in The Taking of Pelham 123 is the very definition of doing way too much.
It doesn’t help that Ryder at one point invites enemies to kiss his “bunghole” and casually says of the sonorous Garber, "He's got a sexy voice though, man. He'd be my bitch in prison.”
As the sonorous gentleman Ryder would like to make his prison bitch, Washington occupies a different universe than Travolta. It's a world of emotions and people and reality far removed from the insane comic book action thrill ride Travolta, and only Travolta, is stuck in.
As a Mayor of New York very much excited to be leaving office imminently, Gandolfini similarly lives in this grounded world of real people and plausible human behavior. The casual, reflexive excellence of Washington and Gandolfini—real goddamn movie stars delivering real movie star performances—throws the incompetent insanity of Travolta’s scenery-devouring turn into even sharper relief.
I am, needless to say, a fan of John Travolta. I am VERY familiar with his work and I think that it was ultimately a mistake to pay him twenty million dollars to be in The Taking of Pelham 123.
The studio and the movie ended up paying a steep price, in every sense, for Travolta’s awfulness. But Travolta paid a big price as well. The movies were about to get a whole lot smaller, to the point where some barely seemed to exist. That’s the curse of the direct-to-streaming star, a position Travolta, as well as Cage, would regrettably hold in the years and decades ahead.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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