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Without even trying, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, the new thriller starring John Travolta as a criminal who hijacks a Manhattan subway train and Denzel Washington as the transit employee who tries to stop him, is a tale of two cities: New York in 1974 and New York today.

In the American imagination, the New York City of the 1970s was a domestic war zone: Vietnam brought home. The murder rate had soared, the wrong kinds of drugs were available on any corner, and the whole place was filthy; Harry Smith, the CBS news anchor, called the city "Calcutta without the cows." New York was nearly bankrupt, and the President was disinclined to help, provoking the Daily News to the decade's iconic headline, "Ford to City: Drop Dead." An army of the emotionally disturbed, evicted en masse from state mental hospitals, made cardboard-box homes on the streets. Graffiti festooned many tenement buildings and scarred the exteriors and interiors of the city's decrepit transit system. Sitting inside a subway car, with its garish scrawls, was like being trapped in someone's deranged mind, screaming out madness from within its metal walls. (See photos of the inner workings of the world's megacities.)

Say this for New York in the mid-'70s: from its desperate blight emerged some pretty sharp movies. Back then, children, Hollywood was actually interested in reflecting contemporary society, and this poster child for urban dystopia provided the perfect setting. A raft of films — Serpico, Death Wish, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver — navigated that stinky Styx with the expertise of a champion white-water rafter. A lesser but still pertinent entry was The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which starred Robert Shaw as the criminal mastermind and Walter Matthau as the transit detective trying to talk him out of it. Among its many attractions, this was an action movie where the tension is conveyed mainly in phone calls betwen the killer and the cop.

Written by Peter Stone from John Godey's novel and directed by Joseph Sargent, the movie mixed thriller elements with rancid comedy to create a tarnished time capsule of Gotham crime, sludge and cynicism. The mayor is a do-nothing schlemiel ("Don't tell me — I don't wanna know"), and the hijacked passengers aren't so scared that they can't give a lot of lip back to their captors. The transit hierarchy is clogged with wise guys. "What the hell do they expect for their lousy 35 cents?" one executive says of the subway hostages. "To live forever?" Another MTA veteran boldly and unwisely struts down the tracks toward the kidnapped train. "Why don't you go grab a goddam aeroplane like everybody else?" he shouts to one of the gunmen. "'Cause we're afraid of flyin'," the bad guy replies, and — BLAM — kills him. The subway system had its murders too, and not just in movies.

Today the fare is $2, and New York, which has the lowest crime rate of any large U.S. city, is the center of another national trauma: the financial crisis. But the subways run so efficiently, and their lurid reputation has retreated so far, that few people complain about anything except the next fare increase. A remake of Pelham One Two Three can duplicate the 1974 film's thriller ingredients: the criminal mastermind, the clock ticking toward certain doom, the runaway train, the ordinary man tapped for a suicidal mission. It just can't locate those conventions in a milieu with any political resonance.

Actually, the most disconcerting aspect of the new Pelham 1 2 3 is the sight of Washington, the usually impeccable movie hero, sitting at a subway dispatcher's console. The star looks puffy and has a gut you could park a Hummer on. Weighing in at a sedentary 220 lb. (100 kg), he's playing a desk jockey burdened by the usual bureaucratic bull plus a scandal that has put his career in the commode. (In the original film, Matthau rarely rose to anger; he was a weary, wily guy, just doing his job. This time it's personal.) And now, on the other end of the line, he's got Travolta, a chatty psychopath who just commandeered an IRT local and wants $10 million, cash, in an hour flat — or he'll commence killing his passenger-hostages, one a minute.

Washington's constricted calm is a smart contrast to the manic Travolta, who's channeling his strutting killer from Face/Off (an annoying switch from Shaw's steely British mercenary). Tony Scott, who did Top Gun and the earlier Washington movies Crimson Tide, Déjà Vu and Man on Fire, directs with his trademark gusto and a surfeit of many circling camera movements. A congestion of cars, arranged as carefully as clusters of Rockettes, isn't traffic; it's just the backdrop for a spectacular crash.

The new script, written by Brian Helgeland, who won an Oscar for his L.A. Confidential, does try to put a stethoscope to the current national malaise when it alludes, toward the end, to the toxic duplicity of insider trading. There's also a superrich mayor (James Gandolfini) who could be Michael Bloomberg with a bigger gut. But most of the film takes place in a fantasy present, where the Dow is at 11,000 — a relic of that halcyon era of 2008, when the movie was shot. And by emphasizing the cop-killer relationship, the picture loses the original's busy fresco of New Yawk types. Pushing, complaining, invading the space of the movie's stars, they were the graffiti in this subway docudrama.

If Hollywood is going to remake a '70s movie, it might as well be Pelham, and it ought to work as competently as this one. But wouldn't it be nice, once in a while, for Hollywood to turn contemporary traumas into vigorous movies instead of hijacking the anxieties of the past?

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• Richard Corliss
• The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is a tale of two cities: New York in the '70s and New York today. If only a subway ride still cost 35 cents