After seeing Tony Scott's Pelham 1 2 3, I got home and threw Inside Man on the Blu-ray player. What is it with Denzel Washington in hostage negotiation movies? The Siege came out on Blu-ray last week too. Aside from Independence Day, it's the one movie whose sales were most definitively helped by 9/11. There's no pretty way to say that, so there it is.
Denzel became the guy standing up for American ideals and it's suited him well. He gets butts in seats. Anyone remember the last time a movie he headlined outright bombed? Didn't think so. Third place behind second week of a movie themed on a blitzed night of excess and a new Pixar movie isn't shabby at all.
I enjoyed Pelham as much as I did because it felt like an adult movie made for adults. Is it the most jaw-dropping, pulse-pounding, hack-critic-baiting thrill-ride of the 21st Century? Hell no, but neither was State of Play. They're movies of a feather, in that they don't have some kind of couldn't-see-it-coming twist to them, but rather, they provoke discourse and discussion. Instead of "holy shit, could you believe what happened" there's some intellectual stuff to talk about, some allegorical dots to theoretically connect in a million different ways.
Travolta's villain is over-the-top, but the critics who went nuts on him have obviously never met a Wall Street guy. You take the average drunken idiot you hang out at parties with on the weekends and give him that kind of bankroll, he's fucked up all day every day of the week and adding "motherfucker" to every sentence he can.
I'm not one of those opposed categorically to remakes as a rule (just bad ones). You take something like Pelham, add some modern relevance and some extra dashes of uniqueness, and I'll go with it. There are those who want to take the easy way out and claim the holy sanctity of the original from 1974. The majority have either only just recently watched Pelham One Two Three because they were born two decades after it came out, or they haven't seen the new one yet.
People who come out still not seeing eye to eye with me on the new Tony Scott movie can rest easy knowing the original stands to get better treatment and should be seen by thousands upon thousands more than it would have. You can watch the whole thing on Fancast for free, and it could make it to Blu-ray catalog release a lot faster now as well, hopefully as some sort of two-pack with this remake.