The Taking of Pelham 123 is a B-movie with A-list talent. This same film could have gone direct to video had it starred actors of lesser caliber than Denzel Washington and John Travolta, and been helmed by a less slickly competent director than Tony Scott. But watching Washington and Travolta spar as, respectively, a Manhattan transit worker and a murderous hijacker, is a lot of fun even if the movie fades from memory mere minutes after it’s over.

Scott directed Washington in Crimson Tide, pairing him with Gene Hackman, and seems to be going for the same level of gravitas and tension here. But Pelham never approaches that film’s heights in part because the stars spend almost the entire running time separated from each other. They generate sparks, but from a distance.

Washington brings some nuance to his portrayal of Walter Garber, the MTA employee unlucky enough to be on the mic when one of the trains is hijacked by Travolta’s baddie. Garber has a rapport with the crook that leads a hostage negotiator played by John Turturro to keep him front and center through the ordeal.

Travolta plays the bad guy, Ryder, as a no-nonsense jokester with a dangerously short fuse and a massive chip on his shoulder. The motive for his crime winds up less interesting than the set-up, but the set-up is pretty good. Jame Gandolfini rounds out the cast as a New York City mayor in the Giuliani mold.

The film is at its best when it combines the cat-and-mouse verbal sparring of its leads with the claustrophobic face-off between the cops and a group of armed men in a stranded subway car. But too soon that car starts moving and the action moves with it, to less interesting places.