'The Taking Of Pelham 123' And The Lamentably Noisy Bad Guy

The Taking Of Pelham 123: Can you pick out the bad guy in this picture? Yeah, we thought so. Sony Pictures

 

by Linda Holmes

If you watch the original 1974 film, The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (and you can, and you should), one of the things you'll notice is how Robert Shaw, as the train-hijacking villain, plays everything with the energy down, not up and out. In his general persona, he's not cackling like a loon, and he's not shrieking like a bully.

He is just explaining the situation and what's going to happen. He is telling you about your possible death dispassionately.

This was very much the era of Evil Wears A Fedora And Thick-Framed Glasses; it came out the same year as The Conversation, with Gene Hackman. That movie also features lots of terrifying guys who look like bureaucrats. For the most part, they speak softly and carry big, big evil.

What evil unfortunately looks like now, after the jump...

It wasn't only fedora villains who used to be this way, though. Think of Alan Arkin in Wait Until Dark.

Not to step away from scholarly observation, but that movie completely freaks me out, and the biggest reason it freaks me out is that Alan Arkin, for the great majority of the movie, is so icy. And contrary to what a lot of actors unfortunately believe, "icy" doesn't mean "aggressively, cacklingly merciless."

It means down, not up and out. To be really, truly scary, it's often the case that less is more.

Even in a movie as overwound as Die Hard, the fantastic Alan Rickman knew this. He surely has his moments of "mwah-hah-hah" cackling, but for the most part, he brings a sort of exasperated but still mundane impatience to the role of Hans -- Hans could be anybody's demanding, expensive-suited boss. He just happens to be the boss of a bunch of dangerous criminals.

That's why I find watching John Travolta in the trailers for the new The Taking Of Pelham 123 kind of disheartening. Perhaps it's very different as a final film -- I haven't seen it yet -- but this looks like the sadistic, insane freakazoid villain who shows up in almost every action film in the current era. Call it the era of Evil Wears Something You Can Pretty Easily Recognize As Evil.

And that's the real problem with these crazy-eyed, scenery-chewing bad guys. When the guy looks like bad news from a hundred yards -- when he looks like the guy you would never get on the train with in the first place -- it's not scary.

What makes villains like the guys in the original Pelham so creepy is that nothing about them looks or seems unusual until they take out a gun and announce that they're going to shoot you. The movie actually starts at a very leisurely pace, showing you the ordinary-looking moments when the four members of what will coalesce into the criminal gang get on the train. Nobody notices them. Nobody is afraid of them.

Tell me you wouldn't be afraid of John Travolta, the way he stomps through the train station with the cap and the wearing-shades-indoors and the overpowering scowl of extraordinary menace. Even New Yorkers would look at that guy and think, "Yyyyyyeah, I'm staying away from that fella."

It doesn't mean big performances can't be good. Heath Ledger certainly played The Joker up and out, and I never get tired of watching Dennis Hopper go completely bazoo in Speed. Pop quiz, hotshot! There are plenty of examples of wild-eyed baddies who are fantastic to watch.

But for this story, which is really about capitalizing on the already-unnerving experience of navigating your city in underground tunnels, it would seem to work better if the threat lay in the unassuming person standing on the train a few seats away, not in the crazy freak who would have you reciting passages from The Gift Of Fear the minute you saw him.