Tony Scott updated the gritty 1974 classic, The Taking of Pelham 123 with his signature style, and introduced it to the 21st century. Featuring his signature editing, camera work and saturated colors, Pelham rockets along, resting easily on the shoulders of the film’s two leads, Denzel Washington, and John Travolta.

Washington plays Walter Garber, a transit authority employee in New York who is about to have a very bad day. He’s already assigned a desk job while an investigation is conducted into allegedly taking bribes for a new train system, but he’s about to come up against a problem with the Pelham train.

Ryder (Travolta) and a small group of armed men have seized the subway train, and are planning on executing the passengers one at a time if the city, and the Mayor (James Gandolfini), hand over ten million dollars.

Ryder will only deal with Garber, and the two begin a dangerous cat-and-mouse game that plays out across the airwaves, as the two duel over microphones. They dig into one another, and attempt to out-maneuver one another, but it will have to come down to an in person confrontation in the end.

Scott keeps things moving, juggling a number of balls to deliver a massive story centered around the train’s seizure.

The only thing I didn’t care for was that it took so long to get Washington in Travolta into the same scene together. For the rest of the film they are interacting, but only through radios, so they don’t share a scene together until the climax.

Still, it’s fast-paced and both Washington and Travolta are a lot of fun to watch in this film. Travolta is wonderfully unhinged, but sticks to his plan the entire time, and Washington sees his world come apart, through the course of the day, all in service to the city.

There’s a nice supporting cast including Luis Guzman and John Turturro. There’s a solid score by Harry Gregson-Williams, who also delivers some other great Scott scores.

I quite enjoyed this one, and it’s been forever since I’d seen it. Everything works really well, there’s some very tense sequences, and I love how Garber is forced to make a final act of violence to end the day.

The ending is a little too neat, but it does wrap up things nicely. And this film, like all of Scott’s other work, reminds me of what a talent he was. Just imagine the stories he could have told us. And I loved his work with Washington.