The opening credits of Tony Scott’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 are set to a remix of Jay-Z’s masterpiece pop single, “99 Problems.” Our first extreme close-up glimpse at the face of John Travolta’s goateed growler, with diamond cross stud in right ear to immediately clue us in to his Catholicism/Achilles Heel, coincides with the first burst of the song’s chorus: “I’ve got 99 Problems but a bitch ain’t one. Hit me!” When I saw the movie, I was sitting next to an older gentleman who, at the close of that first “Hit me!”, audibly groaned. This was just the beginning of his displeasure. In the film’s final scene, there’s a joke about a local New York sports team, which, I thought, worked thanks to James Gandolfini’s delivery. I laughed - not a sustained chuckle, but a single, barked “Ha!” The guy sitting next to me turned to his friend and said, in a voice far above a whisper, “That wasn’t funny! It wasn’t even funny!”

It’s hard for me to understand how someone could get so worked up about the choices made by director Scott in his completely unnecessary remake of the 70s cult classic. Aside from that laugh and a couple of others, which came virtually as knee jerk trained responses to John Travolta’s sleepwalk through his role as a crackpot train hijacker, I felt nothing whilst watching this film. It was almost a Zen thing, a level of calm non-emotion which, I must say, I have rarely experienced at a screening of a studio action film. I’d say that the ultimate affect of Pelham is like being trapped in a loop of white noise, but that sounds sort of cool and futurist, and this film is neither of those things — it’s more like swimming laps in bowl of room-temperature oatmeal. After the screening, I was 10th in line for the ladies room, which gave me time to think about the word “pointless,” and how often it’s wasted to describe endeavors that are merely so boring that they make us resent the expenditure of time, but which actually do have a goal. By the time I’ve moved up to 3rd in line, I’ve vowed to reserve my use of the word “pointless” for experiences like The Taking of Pelham 123, which are literally pointless, in that there is no point of impact. They simply do not have a reason to exist.

Well, maybe this one has *one* reason.

SPOILER ALERT: Travolta steals the train not to steal the train, and not really to walk off with the requested $10 million ransom, but because, as a Wall Street tycoon-turned-convict, he understands that a terrorist scare in the New York subway system would bring the markets plummeting down, and he knows that if he makes such a panic happen, he can short sell the day’s returns and walk off with big bank. The most laughable thing about this plot device is the idea that today’s stock market would need the intervention of Travolta’s stock bad guy to insure a catastrophically bad day. The most offensive thing about it is the suggestion that our market woes are the work of a couple of bad apples, particularly greedy Wall Street types gone in for anarchy when the right and good New York City beauracracy fails to fix things their way. In other words, we are all broke and unemployed and defaulting on our mortgages and generally swirling down the drain not because of endemic societal greed, not because of upwardly hopeful miscalculation on the part of the working poor, not because of  financial systems freed of virtually any regulatory stricture at the behest of the multi-millionaires who spent most of the last decade in power, but for the same brutal simplification that allegedly caused Abu Ghraib: because of the aberrant fuck ups of a couple of morally questionable n’er do wells. If the problem is limited to discreet maleficent cogs in the machine, then it’s easy enough to eradicate. Enter nebbishy city employee with incredible beginner’s luck with a handgun, and voila — problem solved.

Twenty minutes after the screening ends, I’m out on the street in Times Square, waiting for a street light to change, when a giant stock ticker catches my eye. I think about that story in this month’s Vanity Fair about how we basically fucked ourselves for believing that Francis Fukuyama was right — that the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that American-style free market capitalism had won, and that the human race had thus reached the end of history — and that our continued national faith in this myth, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary, is making the rest of the world hate us more than they already do. If this is true, then Scott’s Pelham remake — a love letter to the notion that an unregulated market works just great until someone nefarious, preferably with bad facial hair, deliberately makes it break — is the entertainment that we deserve.