Stale Popcorn

As an enormous fan of the Walter Matthau led original movie (David Shire’s soundtrack is a score I dream daily of owning, seriously!) you’d think I’d be completely opposed to the Tony Scott directed remake of The Taking Of Pelham 1, 2, 3 that is in production right now. Surprisingly not. I recently got sent the shooting script, written by Scott and David Koepp,; I had a read and liked what I encountered; the humour is intact and they’ve avoided “juicing” it up with unnecessary action beats. The ending (“Bless You!”) is still on show too.

Then there’s the cast. As everyone who knows of the original film will be aware; there’s four electric roles up for grabs in the movie – the transit chief negotiating the hostage situation, the hostage taker, the cowardly mayor afraid to make decisions and the hostage taker’s second in command who drives the finale. And Scott has certainly “manned” up with his take on the film:

Denzel Washington is, as you’re aware, the transit chief negotiating the hostage situation, we announced John Travolta is to play the hostage taker and anyone who’s seen his work in Broken Arrow and Face/Off knows how much fun he is when he does villainy, James Gandolfini has recently been announced as the cowardly mayor afraid to make decisions which isn’t a particular bad move for those who saw his cowardly bad turn in the little seen The Last Castle. The hostage taker’s second in command who drives the finale hasn’t been announced to my knowledge but rumour-mill is suggesting that Donnie Wahlberg is taking that part and I like a lot of his work.

I’m really excited about this project and it’s not often you can say that about many a remake! But seriously, we’ve got to wait until July 2009 for this?

Posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 12:45 pm under Movie News by Gazz.
Tags:Movie News

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