'The Taking of Pelham 123' (Scott, 2009)

Travolta hams it up as the villain. But should he have been cast as the hero?

It's a sort of standard operating procedure with hijack/hostage thrillers such as this to have a big reveal in the final reel. A shocking twist that miraculously transforms the cliché characters and mediocre story of the past ninety plus minutes into a film you might actually remember the next morning. Unfortunately, The Taking of Pelham 123 is not one of those films.

Lead actors Denzel Washington and John Travolta contribute to a relatively watchable hundred minutes, but one can't help but feel that they were cast in the wrong roles. I suspect that Washington as the charismatic terrorist and Travolta as the burned out transport operative would no doubt have made for a far more satisfying viewing experience than the final product. That said, they are both highly capable actors whose interaction with one another electrifies, and lifts the film from DTV tosh to cinema-worthy fare.

Tony Scott has always been the kind of guy who loves tinkering with visuals. His use and manipulation of hand cranked cameras in 2004's Man on Fire created an energy and vibrancy that thrilled, terrified and emotionalised in equal measure. Sadly, none of that flare is on display in Pelham, whose misjudged time lapse shots and interspersion of thrash metal superimposed over inserts of ransom money being raced across the city creates the wrong breed of unease and awkwardness.

Somewhere within the the depths of the film, there seems to be an abortive attempt to initiate some sort of critique of Wall Street but, like much of the film, this element is not explored to any compelling degree. It is merely paid lip service before the filmmakers cower from committing to a concrete message of one description or another. Whatever commentary on class warfare was inherent in the story being told simply never comes to any notable fruition.

So this is a film of missed opportunities. Miscast leads. Underdeveloped themes. Underwritten scenes. Underwhelming plot. Misjudged aesthetic. And yet...it is not a complete waste of time. There is some entertainment value to be had here, there is some joy to be gleaned from the performances, and there are moments of high tension that will grip an audience, even if it isn't the best at doing what it does.

*****

'G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra' (Sommers, 2009)

Between this, Isaac Florentine's Ninja, and the Wachowski-McTeigue film Ninja Assassin, it appears the silent star-throwers are making a big screen comeback this year.

Effective ensemble pieces about a team or group of people with a common dramatic purpose are generally quite difficult to get right. Recent success stories include the likes of Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven (2001) while classics like The Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954) continue to be held up as prime examples of the genre. And so it should come as little surprise that G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, brought to you from the director of The Mummy (1999), The Mummy Returns (2001), and Van Helsing (2004), is no Seven Samurai. But then again, it's not Van Helsing either. And that is never a bad thing.

The film centers around two groups, one being a super-secret, super-elite, super-duper task force known as G.I. Joe (referred to colloquially as "The Joes"), and the other being their evil counterparts who will eventually come to be known as Cobra. Through the fiery flames of constant explosive activity lies a feint visage of military moralising - the idea that the soldier is and will forever be the backbone of the military, which is represented by the G.I. Joe unit placing an emphasis on empowering its soldiers, and cannot be mere mindless, moralless killing machines as represented by the brainwashed beta version of the Cobra team. The two teams are constantly set up as being mirror images of each other with equivalent character-types on both sides and even a defection or two taking place as the film progresses. Heck, you only have to look at the layout of the film's promotional poster to see the page split in two, depicting the two sides in connected opposition to one another.

But that's about as deep as it goes. The rest of the film is spent blowing the shit out of anything that seems even remotely combustible in the wake of several rocket-propelled grenades going off inside and around it. And, for the most part, these explosive scenes are suitably entertaining. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the male lead, Duke, played by an almost completely charmless Channing Tatum. His inability to emote leaves underwritten scenes all the more distant from hitting their mark, and it's clear that his wooden presence takes its toll on fellow cast members who engage in an uphill battle to elicit some sense of life and vitality from an actor who is barely deserving of the title. Luckily, Sienna Miller's performance as a conflicted seductress goes some way to remedying her male counterpart's insurmountable flaws, and a host of supporting actors including Dennis Quaid, Arnold Vosloo and Jonathan Pryce enable the material to float a notch or two above its pay grade. Even Marlon Wayans as Funny Black Guy...uh, I mean Ripcord...provides a welcome source of character-based entertainment in a film that is otherwise almost completely overwhelmed by its scale.

Ultimately, Stephen Sommers is a director who generally understands the balance between story and spectacle. While there are moments in G.I. Joe in which he struggles to hold onto the reigns of his story and the characters who populate it, he never lets it slip his grip entirely. There is an undeniable boyish charm to the film. It is not the best of its breed, but it is not entirely valueless as a piece of energetic entertainment. Certainly, if I have to choose between seeing an average but actionless thriller like The Taking of Pelham 123 and an average but action packed blockbuster like G.I. Joe, I'd roll with the Joes any day of the week.

*****