Health & Fitness
Taking Stock of Tony Scott
The late Tony Scott was not a great director but his movies were competently directed. His benchmarks were high-intensity action and great performances from his actors.
A few years ago I reviewed Tony Scott's The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009). It was a companion piece to an article I had written about the original 1974 Pelham, a classic NYC caper film to which the remake was barely worth a comparison. Perhaps it is fitting for Scott's overall career that his work can be viewed as regularly second best and rarely second to none.
The first comparison he runs against is to his brother, Ridley. Obituaries will not fail to mention that despite having many successful films, Tony was the lesser director of the family. At best, you could choose particular Tony Scott films like Crimson Tide (1995), True Romance (1993), and Top Gun (1986) and pit them against Ridley's Robin Hood (2010), Matchstick Men (2003), and G.I. Jane (1997) and younger brother Tony would come out on top.
Yet, Tony Scott's most indelible work like the three mentioned above are more action and star vehicles than great movies; he had no pretensions of being much else. Looking at his work, you can stack up the great stars he directed well: Tom Cruise in two films, Gene Hackman in two, Denzel Washington in five.
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Then there's DeNiro and Snipes in The Fan (1996), Bruce Willis in The Last Boy Scout (1990), Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, and many others in True Romance; Will Smith in Enemy of the State (1998), and Brad Pitt and Robert Redford in Spy Games (2001).
No wonder there's a great outpouring of grief in the acting world at the news of his passing.
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Typical of being second either to his brother or his actors, Tony Scott's most interesting film, True Romance, is more thought of as a Quentin Tarantino movie. Thus, a negative feeling toward Scott's work on the film has developed, rightly or wrongly, because Tanantino disassociated himself from the project. Scott's direction might have been commendable or competent, but he did alter the screenplay into a linear form, essentially flattening the overall effect that Tarantino was trying to achieve.
Scott's last films, Pelham and Unstoppable (2010), seemed to distill the action from his past films at the expense of credible characters and, in some cases, the action. Both dealt with critical situations on trains -- subway cars and a freight train. As one reviewer pointed about Pelham, it seemed odd that a film about a subway heist had an abundance of overhead shots of NYC. You can't deny that both films had their share of tension.
Indeed, they were all tension.
Collingswood resident Bob Castle is an author, teacher, film critic, and playwright. In town, he is also the founder of the Collingswood Movie Club, which meets monthly in the public library for film showings and discussion.
Castle's writing has appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal, Film Comment, and The Film Journal. His plays have been performed during the Philadelphia New Play Festival, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and at the the Gone in 60 Seconds and "In a New York Minute" festivals.
