It’s a fitting project, then, for director Tony Scott, who most likely regards being described as “all flash and no substance” as a wicked compliment. “Pelham” tries to sex up the relatively un-sexy world of municipal transportation management, pitting train dispatcher Walter Garber (Denzel Washington) against a train hijacker known only as Ryder (John Travolta). Stuck behind a desk in a high-tech command center, Garber is the only city employee Ryder will talk to during the hostage situation, which Ryder hopes to parlay into a $10 million ransom within the hour.

But as the pair wait for the New York bureaucratic machine to crank out the ransom money, “Pelham” slows to a crawl. The opportunity was ripe for some tense exchanges between Washington and Travolta, but since neither actor’s character is more than a sketch, their rapport never gets as deep or intense as it should. Brian Helgeland’s script goes to great lengths to give the two men some sort of common ground, saddling Garber with a subplot about taking bribes from a train manufacturer. It’s an unnecessary detail that detracts from the character and adds nothing but dead weight to what should be a lean script.

There’s a lot of dead weight that keeps “Pelham” from achieving the briskness it deserves. James Gandolfini is always great to watch on screen, but his turn as the city’s fussy, exasperated mayor is pointless, though amusing enough. John Turturro and Luis Guzman are also among the supporting cast, but they’re shuffled on and off screen so quickly that they barely stand out. All eyes should be on Washington and Travolta, but Scott continually shifts focus, darting from minor characters to overwrought chase scenes and so on, short circuiting any sort of real tension.

Part of the problem also may be Travolta, who’s just not all that great at being a bad guy. He’s more agitated than evil, and his facial hair, ugly neck tattoo and penchant for ending every sentence with “motherfucker” just don’t add up to any real menace. Later in “Pelham,” it’s revealed that Ryder is a disgraced Wall Street fund manager. While it’s tempting to think this is a sly commentary on our times (one can just picture Bernard Madoff stepping out of the clink with a self-made prison tattoo and an army of thugs), it really just makes Ryder all the more vanilla of a villain.

But that mild malevolence is matched well with Garber’s reluctant heroism, and as long as Washington remains behind his desk directing trains and negotiating with hijackers, his character is confident and strong. The film’s third act pushes him into the unlikely role of an action hero, commandeering cars, skulking down subway tunnels and packing heat, and it’s a change just as unbelievable as Ryder’s half-hearted villainy.

Lost somewhere in “Pelham” is an interesting story about the stultifying power and inefficiency of big city government. There’s a great moment late in the movie, when, after an attempt to get the ransom money from Brooklyn to Midtown ends in series of car accidents, the mayor asks his flunkies why they didn’t just use a helicopter to transport the cash. At this point, it’s not a question of whether Denzel Washington can save the day, but whether the city will get out of its own way long enough to prevent further disasters.

But in the end, ex-Wall Street goons and civil servants just don’t make for compelling players in life-or-death hostage dramas, even when they’re pushed to the brink and wrapped up in red tape. Scott tries mightily, but his usual overwrought, flashy camera work and an arbitrary sense of pacing don’t make “Pelham” as thrilling a ride as it should be.

Being a pedestrian in Dover sucks. There’s no need to gussy up the language or wax too eloquently on the state of walking around through Dover – it is quite simply a hazardous experience that, in the four years I’ve lived here, has only gotten worse. It’s particularly bad in the winter, when city sidewalks are left unplowed for days on end and ice and snow and snowbanks pile up to dizzying heights. In most cases, it’s safer to walk in the street than to wade through knee-deep snow on sidewalks hemmed in on all sides by giant snowbanks. Snow removal budgets are tight, and the city’s Community Services department is probably as overworked and underpaid as everyone else, but the general state of Dover’s sidewalks in the winter is about as bad as it gets.

Sadly, that’s not even the worst part. If, like me, you live just outside of downtown and make it through the hazardous sidewalks and into downtown proper, your chances of getting hammered by one of the thousands of inattentive motorists speeding through Dover each day increases by about a 1,000 percent. Dover’s main drag–Central Avenue and Main Street–resembles a race track, a one-way loop that encourages motorists in both directions to careen through as fast as they can in order to avoid the all-too-frequent traffic jams caused by a seemingly random array of traffic lights and crosswalks that seem to make getting through Dover much less safe than necessary. It’s a NASCAR arena with the added attraction of parked cars and moving targets. Last Thursday’s pedestrian accident is no surprise–the crosswalk at the intersection of Second Street and Central Ave. is poorly marked and motorists never pay attention to it, anyway. On more than a few occasions, I’ve had angry drivers honk and curse (and nearly run me over) at me for interrupting their speedy escape out of a Central Ave. traffic jam. The situation a few blocks up, at the intersection of Broadway, Central Ave. and Third Street, is even worse, with motorists going on and off of Third Street ignoring crosswalks, walk signals and hapless pedestrians with equal aplomb. The traffic lights at this already dangerous intersection were out of order on Sunday afternoon and still weren’t working as of 9:45 a.m. this morning.

The Dover Police Department has stepped up crosswalk patrols in the last year, and while the DPD does a fine job, it’s not enough. The layout of Dover’s downtown encourages this sort of behavior from drivers – and, for that matter, pedestrians. Dover’s pedestrians are by no means blameless, but getting around by crosswalk is no piece of cake. While there are four crosswalks in a four-block stretch on Central Ave. (from the intersection of Broadway/Third Street down to the intersection of Washington Street), there are only two crosswalks on Main Street and relatively few as you head north on Central Ave. There aren’t enough crosswalks, and the crosswalks we do have are just poorly placed. And those walk signals synced up with the traffic lights? Also fairly useless. They last all of 15 seconds–that is, when they’re actually working; if you want to (legally) cross the street at Broadway and Central when a big ‘ol freight train is coming through town, you might as well find a seat and wait it out.

There are improvements to be made–in fact, the city paid for a detailed traffic study a few years ago, but few changes have been made. Our fearless City Council instead devotes much of its time to shenanigans like this: “educational resolutions” that are little more than thinly-veiled personal conflicts between counselors. Local politics are always full of such nonsense, but Dover’s council is more egregious than most, with council business overwhelmingly taken up with discussions of Byzantine email policies and minute details about procedural questions that the average citizen doesn’t give a damn about. Some members of the council recognize this, at least (dubbing the whole motley group “collectively dysfunctional”), but that does little to change the fact the council does little of consequence. It’s not glamorous, but local politics is near about the only area where one can make decisions that have a discernible impact on citizens’ daily lives – an opportunity the majority of council members sees fit to squander in favor of petty political games.

Some progress might be made if City Council members were forced to be downtown pedestrians for a day. Climbing over snowbanks only to get mowed down by some angry driver might put counselors more in touch with the city’s actual problems. More likely, though, they’ll get hung up arguing about who crosses the street first and never make it off the sidewalk.

The slumdog in question is Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a chai-jockey at a call center in Mumbai. Through a number of complex twists of fate, he is one question away from winning the top prize of 20 million rupies on India’s version of that venerable game show institution, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” The only problem is he’s been accused of cheating—after all, how can a kid from the slums know all the answers? Luckily for Jamal, the answers to each question all hearken back to his life in the slums. In a series of flashbacks, we see Jamal and his brother Salim grow up in Mumbai’s slums, narrowly escape a cruel orphanage/child begging ring and hustle their way into adulthood. No matter how dire the circumstances, Jamal remains indefatigable, driven by his love for Latika (Freida Pinto), a little girl he met as a child and for whom he carries a torch, no matter how many miles or years separate them.

“Slumdog” is an unapologetic fairy tale and Jamal’s ultimate destiny is as sweet (but not quite saccharine) as you’d expect. The journey there, however, is sour –and dirty and bloody and even a bit smelly. During one flashback, Salim traps Jamal inside a latrine just as the helicopter of Amitabh Bachchan, Jamal’s favorite actor, lands nearby. Desperate for his idol’s autograph, Jamal holds his nose, jumps down into a fetid soup of human waste and races toward the crowd around Bachchan. He gets the autograph, despite being covered in crap. There are riots, beatings, immolations and a vicious blinding—perhaps not out of place in a Brothers Grimm tale, but not the sort of thing found in the modern movie fairy tale cannon.

The rest of “Slumdog” proceeds similarly, with Jamal’s charmed life and plucky resolve colliding with Salim’s materialism and violent determination to make it out of the slums. There are a couple problems with that, the least of which is that Jamal’s virtue and single-minded pursuit of true love makes him far less compelling than Salim. As Salim, Madhur Mittal always looks nervous, questioning his own actions even as he acts on impulse, his outward cockiness masking his own conflict between protecting Jamal and stealing all that his brother has gained so effortlessly. Patel, though a passable actor in his own right, just isn’t as good and gets through the film mostly using his hangdog face and soulful eyes.

The conflict between the brothers should have been enough to drive the movie, but Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay (based on Vikas Swarup’s novel “Q & A”) is full of almost too many Dickensian complications and contrivances. A blind boy who Jamal encounters one afternoon turns out to be one the children Jamal and Salim left behind at the orphanage. Latika ends up married to the same gangster Salim works for, and so on. Not only must Jamal contend with his gangster brother and his lost love, but the host of “Millionaire” thinks he’s cheating. Game show hosts, apparently, are too cynical to believe in the work of destiny.

Danny Boyle isn’t so cynical, though, and he makes this fractured fairy tale hold together, even as the grittiness of the slums and the romantic optimism of Jamal threaten to overpower each other. The odd camera angles and quick, stream-of-consciousness cuts keep the action interesting enough to distract from the unbelievable coincidences. Boyle is not shy about capturing the grimy slums, all stacked up on hills of garbage, and those images make Jamal’s eventual triumph of destiny more satisfying than cloying. The outcome is inevitable, but just try stopping yourself from feeling a swell of nervous anticipation as Jamal answers that final, fateful question. The escape is temporary, but Boyle seems to recognize that making it out of the slums, even if just for a few moments in a fantasy, is worth all the rupies in the world.

At the center of all the gunfire, missiles and car chases is Toorop (Vin Diesel), a soldier-turned-mercenary living out his days in a run-down apartment in Russia. It’s the future, and some sort of vaguely defined disaster has occurred, with refugees living on the streets and trying to eke out a living by selling guns and dead rabbits. Everyone’s wearing cammo, too, so you know things are really bad.

Toorop is thrown back into the mercenary life when corpulent gangster Gorsky (Gerard Depardieu) recruits him to deliver a young girl named Aurora (Melanie Thierry) and her guardian, Sister Rebeka (Michelle Yeoh), to America. Gorsky doesn’t say why, and Toorop doesn’t ask, and before long, Toorop and the two women are fighting off attackers, climbing around rogue submarines and riding snowmobiles on their trek from Russia to America. Aurora, of course, has a secret, and her mysterious parents are determined to reclaim her for their own ends. Predictably, once all the gunfire stops and the fires are put out, the cynical, jaded Toorop learns how to love. And some sort of messiahs may or may not have been born.

An adaptation of the French sci-fi novel “Babylon Babies,” “Babylon A.D.” cribs heavily from “Children of Men” and “The Transporter,” with a dash of “The Fifth Element” thrown in. But “Babylon” doesn’t have the intelligence or emotional resonance of “Children of Men,” the kinetic action of “The Transporter” or the campy, sort of good-natured spirit of “The Fifth Element.” It’s a ponderous affair weighed down with an unearned self-importance, and even when Diesel is kicking ass, the movie feels like a chore. In a way, it is—trying to keep up with the plot of “Babylon A.D.” is exhausting, and while director Mathieu Kassovitz maintains that much of the plot ended up on the cutting room floor, it’s hard not to imagine a few extra minutes of footage would have cleared things up.

Some of the pieces are in place, and the movie’s production design, by Paul Cross and Sonja Klaus, gets close to the sort of gritty aesthetic in “Children of Men.” Some parts, like the refugee camps in Russia and Toorop and Aurora’s mad dash for a secret submarine, have a unified look and style about them; other parts, such as an airplane emblazoned with a Coke Zero logo, feel lazy and derivative.

By comparison, the world of “Babylon A.D.” is supremely fleshed out when contrasted with the story. The world is apparently run by theocratic corporations, all competing with each other for converts. This is an intriguing bit, but like the rest of the film, it’s one that’s left unexplained and unexamined.  Aurora is supposed to be some sort of genetically engineered messiah—or maybe not. By the end of the movie, any sort of logic is abandoned. Charlotte Rampling gets a few scenes as the High Priestess, the CEO of one of these capitalist theocratic cabals, but she’s mostly wasted. Really, the whole cast is wasted here. Even Vin Diesel, who can partly thank moody sci-fi flicks for his career, isn’t even trying here. He gives a lazy smirk, shoots someone, grumbles a few lines and moves on.

Prior to the film’s release, Kassovitz  offered some surprisingly candid critiques of the movie, blaming Twentieth Century Fox for butchering the film during the editing process, making it “stupid” without the “metaphysical point of view” the film was supposed to have. Kassovitz is right—“Babylon A.D.” sure isn’t smart, but its philosophical credentials aren’t up to snuff, either, and it’s unlikely a special-edition DVD will fix the film’s biggest problem: an inflated sense of self-importance. Kassovitz might have been better sticking with the action and forgeting the god stuff. When confronted with the choice between hubris and excessive explosions, always go for explosions—they never disappoint.

Originally published in The Wire, Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2008.

Originally published in The Wire, Sept. 19, 2007.