I just saw the remake of this classic old 70s action caper and I was severely disappointed. It was such a typical remake - remove all the charm of original, replace with overly-serious “intensity.”
Denzel Washington’s character had none of the quirkiness and the entertaining attitude of Walter Matthau in the original - the only similarity is that they have the same surname (Garber.)
The hectic, cluttered Metro office of the original film has been replaced by a giant futuristic spaceship-cockpit-esque room filled with absurdly gigantic monitor screens, complete with the requisite Hollywood non-existent GUIs and the bleeping and blooping and other R2D2 noises every time a menu is clicked, a screen is scrolled, or any other action involving a computer program takes place. (AGHH!!!)
The bad guys are completely uninteresting and goddamn boring. John Travolta’s character had some potential to be interesting, but like the rest of the movie it was wasted because all it was was potential. The character was also wildly inconsistent - driven and determined to pull off the robbery and escape with the cash one minute, completely suicidal and unconcerned with the success of his plan the next. A far cry from the eccentric and dynamic team of robbers in the original film (who were the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.)
James Gandolfini plays the Mayor of New York, looking horribly obese, florid and rumpled. (He looks like he gained at least 50 pounds since the end of The Sopranos and he already weighed almost 300 pounds at that point.) It’s weird to see him without his Tony Soprano accent, but like all the other actors, he was wasted in this movie. Probably in more ways than one, because I can’t imagine having to slog through the filming of a ponderous bore like this movie without the help of booze and coke.
And the ending - could you possibly be more trite, formulaic, cliched and utterly predictable? I’m not even going to say what it is because it’s SO goddamn easy to guess what happens.
ACK! Ugh! Why oh why? Why do they insist on remaking movies that SHOULD NEVER BE REMADE?! Stop! Stop! Someone needs to step in here and blow the whistle and say, hey, goddammit! Enough! Write new scripts for new goddamn movies instead of digging up the corpses of old 70s films and then pissing all over them!
And… why did they choose this one? Was it picked out of a hat? Was a dartboard involved in any fashion? Did it come to someone in a dream or was someone poring over the Master List of Cheaply-Licensable Properties?
It isn’t iconic. It isn’t ironic. It isn’t (the original, I mean) all that good. It’s a fine example of a genre picture and it’s easily in the top quarter of its genre, but that hardly makes it a capital-G Good Movie. There is no cult surrounding this film and there is no way to get the main actors back for a reunion. (There is a law against literally digging someone up and pissing all over them. Figuratively doing that is apparently too common to prosecute.)
But ignore all that. The real crime here is turning Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw’s character in the original, the ringleader) from a calm mercenary into a screaming moron.
I found out it was a remake after I saw it. That helped. The metro control-thing GUI was extremely ridiculous, I agree. As for Travolta’s character, I actually found it sort of compelling that he switched from intense and focused one second to suicidally unconcerned the next – to me, that was a believable characteristic of his insanity. It reminded me of the kind of confusing conversations one can have with a schizophrenic person. Hmm, I didn’t notice that Gandolfini was “obese.”
Funny, I heard a story on NPR about the control room. The filmmakers said they couldn’t use the design of the newly remodeled real-life control room because it looked too high tech and science-fictiony. So they deliberately made the control room set look lower tech and “realistic”. Apparently they didn’t go far enough. Reality is unrealistic.
I pretty much expected this. I really loved the book and the original movie, very entertaining and I was surprised that Matthau really made me laugh out loud at several moments.
I also am tired of remakes and prequels and crap. Do you know they are making a prequel to Alien? Why, for godsakes?
What’s a GUI?
And yes, can you tell us the ending? I’d like to know if it was the same.
Bad, wasn’t it. I usually like Tony Scott movies but this one was just dire. They remade this for TV a few years back with Vincent D’Onofrio as the leader of the gang. I actually enjoyed that one. But really, how are you ever going to top Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw?
Truly atrocious[spoiler]Denzel isn’t a cop, just a transit worker, so after delivering the ransom, he leads the baddies through the subway tunnels–having previously abandoned the car on its driverless joyride. As one train passes, he sneaks away and then, instead of notifying authorities, surreptitiously follows them. The cops shoot the nameless goons, but Travolta gets away and Denzel has to carjack a pursuit vehicle and follow him (recklessly, of course, through the streets of NYC). Finally, with cops raining down on the scene and helicopters overhead, Travolta has a face-to-face showdown with Denzel (who has a gun, which the cops hid for him in one of the bags of ransom money) and instead of doing what any ordinary civie would do–get the hell out of there–Denzel waits for Travolta to draw his piece and guns him down (though the implication is that Travolta does so intentionally to commit suicide rather than go back to prison).
Mind-numbingly dumb in every conceivable way[/spoiler]
This is the absolute archtype movie that should not have been remade. A basic B-movie that turned out to be above average because of a combination of things that nobody could have foreseen. Perfect example of more is less…
It’s a terrible movie, mainly because every single shot is either a zoom or bullet-time or shaky cam or edited beyond any comprehension. For crying out loud, for a shot of a helicopter flying over New York City the director used the headache-inducing shaky-cam for the helicopter while digitally blurring the city in the background.
Were the producers honestly afraid the audience would get bored during that 10-second shot? Isn’t simply watching a chopper fly over some tall buildings kind of a cool shot as it is?
I could not have said it better myself. You nailed it right there.
As an aside, the expression on Walter Matthau’s face at the very end of the original movie after he hears that guy cough is just priceless. The original at least had a sense of humor.
What would that involve? The Nostromo on one of it’s runs where it didn’t encounter a hostile alien that burst out of one of the crew and killed everyone?
