Lights! Camera! Dongle! As Tony Scott’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 proves, the movies’ relationship with modern computing is often strained. It’s time for Hollywood to uninstall updates, says Damon Wise

Tony Scott is possibly the most modern director working in Hollywood today. His films move so quickly, look so restless, and take place in a world so contemporary, you know that not only were they made in the last 12 months, they might actually have been made in the last five minutes. Scott doesn’t care about posterity, he cares about right now. But with his remake of The Taking Of Pelham 123 – originally a talky, character-based heist thriller from 1974 – he’s made a schoolboy error. There are many ways to signify modernity in such a reboot – mention the fate of the Twin Towers, show an iPod, even have a flashmob party – but to have your leading man hunched over his laptop breaks one of the commandments of modern film: thou shalt not Google.

Hollywood hates the internet because it makes Hollywood redundant. Hollywood is about action and LOUD, INTENSE DIALOGUE!!! It is about confrontation and conflict, sexual frissons and personal interaction. It is not about websites, Wi-Fi and Fatso The Keyboard Cat. But in the new-look Taking Of Pelham 123, after a promising opening in which John Travolta’s tattooed ex-con commandeers a packed subway train and kills a few commuters just to prove his hijacker credentials, our braying antihero is shown staring at his laptop all the time. For reasons that will never satisfactorily become clear, he’s playing some sort of game with the stockmarket that will pay much higher dividends than the $10m ransom he is demanding. Whatever. But it is a measure of the ubiquity of the internet these days that it’s really quite painful to see anyone actually using it.

Since the terrible 1995 Sandra Bullock conspiracy movie The Net, Hollywood has been surprisingly coy about the World Wide Web, using computer interfaces in reserve simply to move the plot along. In the days of film noir, the telephone was a staple device, but the mysteries of a one-sided conversation (“OK … ” Click! Brrrrrr … ) just do not translate in this world of SMS, email and Skype. Indeed, the only true romcom of the WWW age remains You’ve Got Mail, a 1998 remake of a 1940 James Stewart vehicle in which two workmates who hate each other fall in love via pseudonymous emails, just as their predecessors fell in love via anonymous, handwritten letters – a cute formula that was nicely subverted in Miranda July’s Me And You And Everyone We Know (2005), in which a sexually jaded gallery owner falls for the smutty chatroom talk of a little boy.

But there’s not a lot in between. Emails don’t generate much emotion, and this was used to great effect in the 2006 French thriller Tell No One, in which a widower accused of murdering his wife receives a cryptic email, eight years later, showing the woman very much alive. From here, though, the film reverts to type. Though it starts in cyberspace, it ends with shootings and car chases, much like any American equivalent. Because there’s only so much the internet can do, and for the most part these days, the internet is simply used as shorthand for research, replacing the old horror movie/thriller device in which suspicious parties visit the vaults of local newspapers to find out the details of past crimes, or pull out a book to investigate a hunch. Even The Da Vinci Code, the most soporific “thriller” ever made – in which its star boards a double-decker London bus and says, in all seriousness, “I’ve got to get to a library … fast!” – didn’t bother wasting our time with much internet faffing, preferring instead to rope in some random youth with a WAP phone and a browser.

Indeed, although Ken Loach’s recent film Looking For Eric drew plaudits from largely male critics who were blinded by the sight of football superstar Eric Cantona walking and talking, sometimes even at the same time, not many noticed that the film itself was really quite a gimmicky step back for one of British cinema’s normally most nuanced directors. Not only did it climax in a vigilante free-for-all which, in Cannes, had Quentin Tarantino punching the air (a put-it-on-the-poster seal of approval for anyone else), but the film was bogged down by a happy-slapping subplot involving gangsters, camcorders and YouTube.

This might be Loach’s bid to stake some kind of claim on modernity, but it’s worth noting that even Hollywood has cottoned on to the fact that such modernity is anathema to drama. How many films have you seen in which mobile phones are broken, don’t get a signal or run crucially out of juice? How many films have you seen in which a simple down/upload takes an excruciating amount of time while morally ambiguous character actors pad closer and closer? And how many films have you seen in which a code is refused, re-entered, changed and finally accepted in a font-size so big that even Mr Magoo would see it? Let’s face it, the entire Da Vinci Code could easily have been solved using a combination of Wikipedia, 192.com and Yahoo.

Another ghastly modern trope that The Taking Of Pelham 123 uses is the webcam. In a nod to the growing phenomenon of “citizen journalism”, one of the passengers has conveniently left his laptop open, providing a live feed to his girlfriend, who takes it straight to the news networks. Something similar worked pretty well for last year’s first-person-POV monster flick Cloverfield, but it’s perhaps no coincidence that the last time a computer webcam provided a major point in a mainstream movie was probably 1999′s American Pie, which found a horny teenager trying to broadcast a live sex tape to his mates. But even with its cyberspace trimmings, that movie degenerated into a plain, old-fashioned Hollywood morality tale, and by the final reel the webcam has all but been forgotten.

There are, however, exceptions. Modernity can and has been used to great effect, in remakes too, and not just to emphasise the new “newness”. DJ Caruso’s Disturbia (2007), despite its horrible title, updated Hitchcock’s 1954 classic Rear Window and largely succeeded, simply by placing its teen hero under house arrest. Tagged and confined to quarters, this volatile kid becomes defined by what technology will and won’t let him do: his electronic tag means he can’t leave the front and back yards, but the denial of phone and computer shrinks his capacity for defence when faced with a neighbour who may or may not be a killer. The same goes for Tony Scott’s own Enemy Of The State (1998), a loose remake of The Conversation in which Will Smith’s hapless lawyer becomes a victim of a virtual assault that robs him of his identity.

In The Taking Of Pelham 123, however, the use of wireless technology is crass to the point of embarrassing, taking great lengths to explain how Travolta’s character gets a signal down in the bowels of the New York transport system when, quite frankly, it would be more helpful to see Travolta’s character as anything more that just a two-dimensional psycho with a Vaio. It’s worrying that, in 2009, we’re expected to be distracted from the implausible dialogue, hollow special-effects action and lame plotting – all less convincing than they ever were in the ingenious 1974 original – simply because the bad guy’s got a laptop and a dongle. A very poor show indeed.

Cut the wap
How using the internet completely ruins drama …

• Citizen Kane (1941) “Now available to buy on eBay!!! One child’s sledge, hand carved. Named ‘Rosebud’. Formerly owned by Charles Foster Kane. Believed missing; slightly singed. Only one in existence. NO RESERVE.”
• Psycho (1960) From Mysinglefriend.com: “Mrs Bates has this to say about Norman: ‘If you’re looking for a great time, then I recommend you get in touch with my son. A hard worker, he likes reading, dressing-up and taxidermy. Painted sluts need not apply!”
• Pacific Heights (1990) From Craigslist: “Located in sunny San Francisco, this delightful newly refurnished apartment is situated on the basement floor of a traditional building. No sociopaths, please. Smoker preferred. Must love dogs!”
• The Commitments (1991) From the Commitments’ MySpace page: “Thanks for the add, guys! Keep up the good work! There is a market for what you’re doing, you know!”
• Shallow Grave (1994) “Attention criminals on the run! PayPal lets you send money to anyone with email. PayPal is free for consumers, and works seamlessly with your existing credit card and current account … ”
• The Lost World (1997) “Google Earth 6.0 features abandoned sites of prehistorical interest (believed missing) … “
• I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998) “Hey, guys, I’ve
just Yahooed the capital of Brazil and it says it’s Brasilia. It’s not Rio
De Janeiro at all. Hmm, I think we’re being set up … “
• The Truman Show (1998) From Truman Burbank’s Twitter feed: “Outsideviewer@Truman: Hey dude ur parents r totally lying 2 U; U live on TV man … “
• Titanic (1997) From weather.com, circa 1914: “Large passenger ships
sailing in the Atlantic Ocean are advised to be aware of a large iceberg
400 miles east of Newfoundland. Proceed with caution!”

• The Taking Of Pelham 123 is out on Friday