Taking of Pelham 123:

Why is Tony Scott allowed to make films? To churn lengthy commercials which incite us with manipulation to buy aspirin for a headache we don't have? Seems so. He's somehow strayed into feature films, vomiting camera moves across screen, furrowing his brow under no doubt a tiresome baseball cap while pointing meaningfully to meaningless overdone cinematic constructions. His nauseating roundy-round camera moves feel like the Hallmark© Card of suspense films. Especially when their jutted against flashy blunt instrument titles, punctuated with freeze frames, and then if you didn't get the BIG IMPORTANCE, layered with accompanying dramatic sound flourishes. His machinations reek of a hollow mind thrashing in Inferno, grasping at slippery reeds, trying to macho his Soul onto a Platform seconds before Real Wisdom sees through his snake oil cinematic crap, flushing him to a hell of hackneyed Form without Content. Walter Gropius and Abel Gance sit on mushrooms burping methane gas which he must inhale...Oh if it were only true. 21st century scientist theorize his brain must be made of styrofoam, issuing a burning toxic gas of sound and fury signifying nothing.

This film was an complete embarrassment to watch. A stylistic slap in the face, the film was the perfect candidate for the ADD Award, chock full of music videoesque unmotivated camera moves and shaky-cam, set on paper thin characters. Tony Scott wastes any subtlety possible in fine performers like Denzel Washington by larding the screen with whooshy action flourishes, transparently designed to poke anxiety into one's lymbic system, but instead just chaff the eyes like the hot air it is. I think the sympathetic tear I shed for Washington's character was accidental, meant for my own grief at the sorry state of filmmaking.

All of the suspense was made predicable by Scott's iron skillet over-the-head approach to action, deflates believability, rendering it a total farce. One cop car after another flying off overpasses may've been to impeach NYC policing, yet it backfires as a cheap cinematic gruel slopping out of the tawdry bag of hackneyed tricks Scott carries no doubt from commercial days at RSA.

Give up Tony Scott, your work is insulting, pitiful, empty and full of the excess of narcissist reigns on the canvas; you spoil your subject with crass impatience, ruining even the best of talents with nothing more than smoke and shaking mirrors. The money you make to ferry yourself in your luxury car, hang your hat in your overpriced unhumble home is borrowed on the minds of shanghai'ed viewers. Return it and we may forgive you for your abominal stylings you deem cleverly released into the public culture.

Hopefully someone will rope you back to the small screen to contain your hubris, which after viewing Pelham, works only on the lymbic system, hiding in full cowardice to venture further into any meaningful communication with the human psyche. You have the subtlety of a piano falling at 1000 feet, the horror of a refined instrument with only a few keys able to convey beauty in the right hands put into service as a crude gravitational fall, it's refined qualities reduced to sheer mass.

Tony Scott, stop, go back to roots.