The film is about a train dispatcher (Denzel Washington), who is pressed into the role of negotiator after a criminal (John Travolta) hijacks a subway car of passengers.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority employee Walter Garber, working the Rail Control Center as a train dispatcher, receives a call from Ryder, demanding $10 million in cash to be paid within 60 minutes.

Bashkin kills an intervening plainclothes New York City Transit Police officer, and all the passengers not in the front car, except the motorman, are released.

To save the hostage, Garber claims that he was offered the bribe while deciding between two companies, using the money to pay for his child's college tuition, and insists he would have made the same decision regardless.

Based on clues from Garber's conversations, the police discover that Ryder is Dennis Ford, a manager at a private equity firm who was sentenced to prison for investment fraud.

The train comes to a screeching halt safely just before Coney Island (West 8th Street-New York Aquarium), and the police discover that Ryder is no longer on board.

The first drafts of the script faced the challenge of updating the novel with contemporary technology, including cell phones, global positioning systems, the Internet, laptops, and thermal imaging, as well as the environment of a post-9/11 world in New York City.

In December 2007, David Koepp, who adapted the novel for Scott and Washington said:[7] I wrote many drafts to try and put it in the present day and keep all the great execution that was there from the first one.

[13] Outdoor street filming locations were the lower level of the Manhattan Bridge; Tudor City, including the First Avenue tunnel near the Headquarters of the United Nations; the Upper East Side; Times Square and the Theater District area; the Whitlock Avenue station on the Pelham Line in Hunts Point, Bronx; and Turtle Bay.

The scene with the police leaving the Brooklyn Federal Reserve, which does not exist, was actually the rear of the United States Postal Service Office of the Inspector General, located next to the World Trade Center, in front of the PATH station entrance.

Travolta released the following statement: Tony, Denzel, Luis, John, James and Sony Pictures stepped up without hesitation to help promote this wonderful film, and their unselfish efforts have allowed my family the additional time to reconcile our loss.

The site's critical consensus says: "Despite a strong cast, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 suffers under the excesses of Tony Scott's frantic direction, and fails to measure up to the 1974 original.

[17] Jim Ridley of the Village Voice noted that the new Pelham film was not as good as the original: "Scott's redo comes up short in almost every regard against the '74 model ...

"[18] "As expected, Tony Scott’s hyperkinetic, entirely unnecessary revamp attempts to update Pelham by cranking the volume and inflating the Noo Yawk attitude to a cartoonish level of macho posturing," wrote Sean Burns in Philadelphia Weekly.

"[20] Michael Rechtshaffen of The Hollywood Reporter noted: "Even with the plot's built-in ticking clock, the film relinquishes the tautly calibrated pace in the third act, never to get completely back on track.

"[21] David Edelstein's review for New York Magazine carried the headline "The Taking of Pelham 123 is not worth running down a flight of subway-station stairs for.

"[22] Roger Ebert gave the film two and a half stars, and began his review with "There's not much wrong with Tony Scott's The Taking of Pelham 123, except that there's not much really right about it.

[24][25] Writing for the Orlando Sentinel, Roger Moore gave the film three out of five stars, and commented "Pelham, for its crowd-pleasing heart-racing virtues ... plays out like a Tony–Denzel pairing that Denzel, at least, should have taken a pass on.

"[27] Peter Travers, writing for Rolling Stone, gave the film 3.5 stars out of 4, stating, "This movie hits you like 600 volts from a sparking third rail.

"[28] Film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, writing in his blog, commented that he loved the film, and thought it was one of three of Scott's great movies of the 2000s, saying: "... the coherence in his films is not between the pages of a script; it's between shots, and his greatest asset (both to himself and to cinema as a whole) is his ability to construct scenes out of shots that take place across great distances of space or time, as in his two best movies: Déjà Vu (much of whose running time consists of characters watching a past event through a sort of time machine) and his remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 (where the two main characters develop a complex relationship, despite not meeting until the end of the movie).