As I was settling into my seat for the screening of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, a young man came up to me and asked, “Are you excited?”
“I guess,” I said (unconvincingly). “I really loved the original, so I’m not exactly sure why we needed a remake.”
“This is a remake?” the kid asked.
And there you go.
To be honest, I actually feel sorry for people whose sole experience with this film—about the hijacking of a New York subway car—comes courtesy of Tony Scott’s slickly efficient but soulless version. The original was gritty, funky, funny, and humane—positively redolent with a sense of New York City and its people.
The new flick has its moments—mostly the scenes between Denzel Washington as Walter Garber, the mild-mannered NYC transit worker, and John Travolta as Ryder, the pissed off philosopher-hijacker he must negotiate with—but Scott is clearly much more interested in keeping the action swift and the body count high than giving us a sense of place.  In Joseph Sargent’s original, we felt the  anxiety of the hostages, plus a bit of their...

When the trailer for The Hangover first came out—with its promise of a bachelor party run amok (tigers! babies! Mike Tyson! oh my!)—it became an instant YouTube classic. But I wondered, could the film sustain that kind of hilarity? Could it really continue to up the ante of outrageousness?
The key to a film like this is to reveal the insanity in pieces: How did square dentist Stu (Ed Helms) lose his tooth and get married to a hooker (Heather Graham)? How did Doug the groom (Justin Bartha) get lost? Why does the hotel valet think they’re cops? Why is there a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, and a naked man in the trunk of their vintage Mercedes? And most importantly, why can’t the guys remember anything? (The in-retrospect ironic toast, the night before the mayhem? “To a night we’ll never forget.”)
The details are meted out brilliantly as the boys search for Doug and try to recreate the events of their lost evening. It would be easy to do it all in flashback, but director Todd Phillips (Old School) plays it more...

He’s baaaaack. Sam Raimi, the talented director who started his career with the cult comic-horror classic The Evil Dead and then gravitated to more mainstream work like A Simple Plan and The Spider Man series, has returned to the genre that made him famous. I’m happy to report that he has not gone soft.
Nope, from its straight-to-the-point title, to its pussy, oozy, “I just threw up a little in my mouth” special effects, Drag Me to Hell will make you scream with both fear and laughter. It’s a fast-paced, deliriously nasty joy ride to hell.
Baby-faced Alison Lohman is perfectly cast as loan officer Christine Brown. Her boss (David Paymer) thinks Christine is a little too compassionate toward her customers, and she’s in danger of being passed over for a promotion in favor of the smarmy suck-up Stu (Reggie Lee). So when a decrepit gypsy woman (Lorna Raver)—her false teeth are corroded and her nails are dirt-caked talons—comes into the bank asking for a third extension on...

You think they would’ve learned their lesson. For all of the book’s massive success, The Da Vinci Code movie managed to be both over-wrought and boring. So what made Ron Howard, Tom Hanks and co. think they could do any better with Dan Brown’s less beloved Angels & Demons?The problems are roughly the same: Hanks’ character, symbologist Robert Langdon, is a dud. He is defined by three things: Improbable bravery (for a symbologist), expert knowledge of religious iconography, and a skepticism about religion in general. He’s not really a character, he’s a cipher: But lead characters in movies need distinguishing personalities: Brown (and now Ron Howard) can’t even be bothered to give Langdon a nervous tic, a bad habit, hell, a fondness for show tunes.Also, books can be filled with an air of academic authority that allow us to buy even the more far-fetched aspects of the plot. But when a book is reduced to all plot, we tend to pick up on how silly it really is.Last time we saw Langdon, he was getting to the bottom of no...