Taxi (15.)
Directed by Gerard Pires. 1998.
Starring Samy Naceri, Frederic Diefenthal, Marion Cotillard and Manuela Gouray. French with subtitles. 86 mins. Released on Blu-ray by Second Sight.
If the career of Luc Besson can be compared to that of Robert De Niro, Taxi is his equivalent of buying the Tribecca Centre. The decline/ plunge in his performances can be pinpointed to the moment he became less interested in painstaking preparation for each role and more concerned with expanding his Manhattan property portfolio. One year it's Midnight Run, the next it's We're No Angels.
For the best part of two decades Besson had concentrated more or less solely on his own films. After Leon, he decided to expand his vision beyond the films he could make himself and turned to producing, hiring out other directors to film his unmade scripts. In the first half of his career, between 1981 and 1997, IMDB lists him has having 15 producer credits, mostly for his own films or accompanying shorts; in the next 17 years he has 100.
The auteur turned himself into a film studio, and did so very successfully. So Taxi is a pretty big deal – not only did it spawn three sequels, a Hollywood remake (with the inexplicable pairing of Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon) and a TV series but its success was the root for a variety of action movies series such as Transporter, Taken and District 13.
None of which makes Taxi an interesting film. It's a comedy action romp around Marseilles. Naceri is speed addicted Taxi driver who teams up with a cop (Diefenthal) who has failed his driving test eight times to catch a group of German bank robbers called The Mercedes Gang. The lead actors are young and have a full head of hair but otherwise this is a template for all the films that followed: it all looks bright and clean and it whizzes breezily past but, although it seems to think its fun, it remains almost entirely inexplicable.
Both the action and humour is oddly child like. Watching it I wondered who the target audience was who would enjoy and recalled a Terrence Hill and Bud Spenser film I saw in a double bill with Herbie Rides Again when I was very young that had the same mix of slapstick and car chases and had briefly been of much interest to me. Everybody is toting automatic machine guns, most of the dialogue is abuse and Cotilard flashes her boobies, but basically this is like the Chuckle Brothers spoofing the bank robbery scene in Heat.
Leon Review
Lucy Review
Directed by Gerard Pires. 1998.
Starring Samy Naceri, Frederic Diefenthal, Marion Cotillard and Manuela Gouray. French with subtitles. 86 mins. Released on Blu-ray by Second Sight.
If the career of Luc Besson can be compared to that of Robert De Niro, Taxi is his equivalent of buying the Tribecca Centre. The decline/ plunge in his performances can be pinpointed to the moment he became less interested in painstaking preparation for each role and more concerned with expanding his Manhattan property portfolio. One year it's Midnight Run, the next it's We're No Angels.
For the best part of two decades Besson had concentrated more or less solely on his own films. After Leon, he decided to expand his vision beyond the films he could make himself and turned to producing, hiring out other directors to film his unmade scripts. In the first half of his career, between 1981 and 1997, IMDB lists him has having 15 producer credits, mostly for his own films or accompanying shorts; in the next 17 years he has 100.
The auteur turned himself into a film studio, and did so very successfully. So Taxi is a pretty big deal – not only did it spawn three sequels, a Hollywood remake (with the inexplicable pairing of Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon) and a TV series but its success was the root for a variety of action movies series such as Transporter, Taken and District 13.
None of which makes Taxi an interesting film. It's a comedy action romp around Marseilles. Naceri is speed addicted Taxi driver who teams up with a cop (Diefenthal) who has failed his driving test eight times to catch a group of German bank robbers called The Mercedes Gang. The lead actors are young and have a full head of hair but otherwise this is a template for all the films that followed: it all looks bright and clean and it whizzes breezily past but, although it seems to think its fun, it remains almost entirely inexplicable.
Both the action and humour is oddly child like. Watching it I wondered who the target audience was who would enjoy and recalled a Terrence Hill and Bud Spenser film I saw in a double bill with Herbie Rides Again when I was very young that had the same mix of slapstick and car chases and had briefly been of much interest to me. Everybody is toting automatic machine guns, most of the dialogue is abuse and Cotilard flashes her boobies, but basically this is like the Chuckle Brothers spoofing the bank robbery scene in Heat.
Leon Review
Lucy Review
