Return This Love Letter to Sender

The hissing of the brakes, the squealing of metal wheels on metal tracks — after the first vivid minute or so of “The Taking of Pelham 123� I could almost smell the hot exhalation of the tunnels on the Lexington line.

   Tony Scott’s production design is richly colored and stylish, with a constantly moving and swooping camera, and provides much of the pleasure of this disappointing and thrill-less movie.

   I’ve never seen the 1974 original, so can’t compare the new version, which stars Denzel Washington, portly and graying,  as MTA subway dispatcher Walter Garber, and John Travolta, sharply moustachioed, as the subway hijacker Ryder, who takes 18 passengers hostage in return for a $10 million payoff. 

   Since Scott rigorously observes all the conventions of the genre, it’s never in doubt who will live and who will get gruesomely executed (this movie revels in slow motion spattering of blood).  The parade of stereotypes offers no surprises, nor does the depressing fact that women have about five lines, total. There aren’t even any memorable passengers on the hijacked trains, just the usual cute kid and heroic ex-military guy.

   Even the acting is subdued. Travolta phones it in, recycling demented cackles and menacing shouts from other villanous roles past.

  And Washington, attempting to talk him down and prevent the shedding of blood until the ransom money arrives, tamps down his natural charisma to play a downtrodden family man who’s called on to become an accidental hero after one last humiliation.

   The supporting players have it better: John Turturro, as Camonetti, an expert hostage negotiator, takes an underwritten part and adds some much-needed juice.

   And James Gandolfini, as a craven and cowardly mayor, gets in a few sharp cracks and bits of New York humor before he suddenly figures out what Ryder is really up to. The subway hijacking is a decoy, designed to run up the price of gold on Wall Street.  But that twist, like many others, goes nowhere, slowly. The film’s climax is just a long, tedious car chase, ending up with Garber vs. Ryder on the Manhattan Bridge. Like almost every other scene in the film, this one makes no sense and takes too long to come to its incredibly obvious conclusion.

   For a film whose best trait is its visuals, there’s one additional disappointment. It tries to be a love letter to New York City. In a scene where Garber is flown in a helicopter to meet Ryder face to face, Camonetti gestures to the glittering city below them and says, “you can see what you’re fighting for.â€� But New York never becomes a believable character, here.