Director Tony Scott’s The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is a skillfully made, complex thriller of a subway train heist/hostage situation in Manhattan’s complex underground system, which is in many ways as effective as the 1974 Joseph Sargent film it’s based on. Whereas the original was a tight simple narrative of a hostage situation for ransom, Scott’s film and screenplay by Brian Helgeland adds an effective variety of character motivations and visual flare that keeps viewers glued to the screen’s action.

Denzel Washington plays Walter Garbe, a transit dispatcher who has his normal’s day routine disrupted by a hijacking of the city’s Pelham subway train by a group of ex-cons lead by an obsessed criminal played with psychotic glee by John Travolta. In the original, these roles were played by an atypically serious Walter Matthau and the stoic Robert Shaw. Scott’s version adds a more complex personal back story to each of these central characters which makes the cat and mouse game of the hostage negotiations all that more effective because the viewers quickly grow to care for the protagonist and even the antagonist.

In addition, Scott, whose films always have an interesting visual style from fluid camera movements to kinetic editing, enhances the compelling nature of the film by adding more direct references to time passage until the ransom money gets to the hostages takers. Instead of the simple phone communication of the original, Scott wows viewers with computer graphics of a state of the art transit control center depicting the intriguing labyrinth of the subway system and how the police narrow their race with time.

Washington’s Garbe is a quietly compelling everyman who audiences connect with immediately; Travolta is an emotionally edgy cold killer with an oddly interesting pre-criminal career as a private equity investor. Expanding further on the original story, based on John Godey’s novel, Scott adds a tough NYPD hostage negotiator, played with sturdy coolness by John Turturro and James Gandolfini is nicely persuasive as the smart millionaire New York mayor, clearly inspired by Mayor Bloomberg. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 provides rewarding summer entertainment.