Thirty-five years after the original screen version of John Godey’s book The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 thrilled audiences, fast-paced action director Tony Scott (Top Gun, Crimson Tide, Man on Fire) has upped the ante in some respects for his contemporary version of this subway hijacking story, though fortunately most of the thrills remain intact.

The premise is the same — a gang of hijackers hold 19 people hostage aboard a subway car (it was 17 in the original) and demand that a ransom be paid in one hour or they will kill one hostage for every minute of delay. Scott has mined the suspense and the thrills of the situation, with more than one murder during the tense showdown and with John Travolta, as the maniacal ringleader who calls himself Ryder, keeping the negotiating team on tenterhooks.

But hijackers who demanded $1 million ransom in 1974 now want $10 million. There also is a subtext motive that involves Wall Street trading and which seems both new and a little out of date. The Dow Jones stock index tumbles after the hijacking due to fears that it’s part of a broader terrorist plot. But the market in the film, seen on Internet reports, starts in the 12,500 range, which still seems pretty terrific given current market conditions.

The film’s technology is new, of course, with cell phones and Internet connections that enable the hijackers to check out the status of both Wall Street and the impending delivery of their ransom. One of the passengers has a laptop computer that’s Web-casting the unfolding action as it happens to his girlfriend’s apartment and then to a rapt worldwide audience when she sends it out on the Internet.

In the original, Walter Matthau plays as cynical and grumpy New York City Transit Authority Police Lt. Zachary Garber who fielded the demands of the hijackers, led by the cool if squirrelly British actor Robert Shaw. This time “Walter” Garber (a nod to Matthau, no doubt) is played by Denzel Washington, a high-up transit official who is under suspicion of having taken a bribe in the city’s purchase of new subway cars. He is being punished by being assigned to the subway dispatch center where the progress of each train is tracked on a big light-up board. The bribery charge gives Washington’s Mr. Good Guy a complicated background and a wobbly edge with human failings and foibles. The script by Rhode Island-born Brian Helgeland, who grew up in New Bedford, adds new dimensions to the character of Garber who is not crotchety like Matthau, but under pressure both in the hostage-taking situation and from the bribery charges against him. In one frantic sequence, Ryder takes aim at those pressures to see if he can push Garber to the snapping point.

Shaw’s Ryder is played by Travolta in a performance that sometimes races almost over the top and is just a hair under insane. Should we laugh at this guy or be terrified? Clever and smart and in a constant rage, Travolta’s Ryder is a coiled snake who is set off by the slightest and sometimes most innocent comments, something that adds a lot to the film’s explosive tension. But while Garber seems a real person who wins Ryder’s trust to a scary degree, Travolta takes Ryder to some other plane. This portrayal makes Pelham 1 2 3 highly theatrical rather than being grounded in the real world.

Scott helps make us forget that much of the first third of the film is not much more than talking heads by having the camera swirl around Garber, who is plunked behind a desk wearing a head set, and Ryder, who is on the phone to him from the cab of a subway car, which leaves not much room for swirling. There’s also plenty of rapid-fire cutting between these two as they talk, intercut with short bursts of footage that shows the cops racing to carry the $10-million ransom to the drop-off point. It gives the impression that Pelham 1 2 3 is moving lickety-split 1 2 3.

Once the ransom demand is made, however, the film picks up speed in attempts to both collect the $10 million and to deliver it, a race-the-clock sequence that is similar to director Joseph Sargent’s original film and at times plays like a comedy of errors.

Making strong presences are John Turturro in one of his most memorable performances in years as a no-nonsense hostage negotiator who comes to respect the judgment calls Garber makes, and James Gandolfini, who seems to be channeling Rudy Giuliani with more than a little help from the script’s plot points, as the mayor of New York City.

Scott keeps building the pressure with flashpoint on-screen bulletins that count down the minutes to when the ransom must be paid … or else. Despite near constant tension, however, it all leads, as it did in the 1974 film, to a resolution that seems anticlimactic. Things play out too easily. You may well be left wondering, is that all there is?

***1/2The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Starring: Denzel Washington, John Travolta, John Turturro, Luis Guzman, Michael Rispoli, James Gandolfini.

Rated: R, contains violence, profanity, tense moments.

mjanuson@projo.com