One of the things about having read Paperbacks From Hell is that Grady Hendrix does a really solid job of laying out that for all the ways that the horror genre can be progressive, it can also be tremendously conservative as well, drawing the root of the threat of the horror from societal prejudices. The same lies with the thriller and disaster genres – a place where The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) falls. When a screenwriter or author succumbs to the temptation to make bystanders and victims into archetypes as a shorthand, what archetypes are used matter.
So, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three falls firmly into the “Cities in general (and New York in particular) suck, aren’t you white viewers glad you skipped out to the suburbs?” camp. The premise of the film is that a group of hijackers, led by a former Rhodesian Merc, along with a guy the mob thought was a loose cannon and kicked out (stick a pin in that), plus some general muscle and a fired train driver who got set up, hijack a New York subway train, and demand $1 million in ransom. The film then shifts between the hijackers (with color-coded nicknames), various police monitoring the situation, and New York Transit Police Lieutenant Zachary Garber who is trying to coordinate the response and who communicates with the hijackers.
This is based on a novel by John Godey, who ostensibly grew up in New York, but if this is representative of the novel, then like Eric Van Lustbader and Black Blade, this is a book by an author who has checked out of the Big Apple a while back, and was writing a version of New Yorkers meant to appeal to those in Middle America who viewed New York in its worst light. The hijack victims view the hijacking itself with annoyance and apathy, the Mayor only cares about getting votes, the supervisor from the Transit Authority would rather all the hostages be killed than the train schedule be disrupted. The only characters who are written as remotely sympathetic are the cops, particularly the transit cops. This is absolutely a movie where, if it came out today, as is, the refrain from public and critics alike would be “I don’t care about these people.”
I understand that this came from a period of minimalism in writing, but unless the novel gives the characters some interiority that doesn’t make it to the screen, there’s nothing here to give the hostages any more personality than the miscellaneous passengers in one of the Airport movies. When one of the hostages gets shot – it’s played for pathos, and it worked a little bit, but nowhere near what I think the director intended. I didn’t know the hostage’s name, and I didn’t have a sense of their personality. The hostages generally just sit quietly and don’t talk to each other. That’s probably what they’d realistically do, but realism does not necessarily a good movie make.
I’m glad I watched the movie. I found myself in a situation where it was on Pluto TV or some other service, I might put it on, but I was not a fan of this movie.
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