Taxi



Taxi (1998) is a French action comedy that has an American remake coming out later this year. The core concept sounds great, and that’s why Hollywood was interested: A neurotic cop who keeps failing his driving test has to ask a moderately insane cabbie with a souped-up taxi to help him capture a gang of bank robbers with powerful cars of their own. Beyond that set-up, though, I suspect that the American version will not resemble the French version at all, because despite looking like an action film, sounding like an action film, and even setting up action scenes, the French Taxi is almost completely without action. (It’s also a little low on comedy, at least to my American tastes.) For example, from that brief description you’d think that at one point the cop and the cab driver would end up chasing the thieves as they leave the scene of a crime. That never happens in Taxi.


"I don't date hobbits."

Daniel (Samy Naceri) is the cabby, who just got his taxi license and is trying to juggle his nascent professional life with a hot girlfriend, Lilly (Marion Cotillard). Emilien (Frederic Diefenthal) is the cop who can’t drive, and he has a crush on his Amazonian German colleague (Emma Sjolberg). The robbers are the Mercedes Gang, Germans who use fast cars, hostages, and lots of deception. They are so confident of their abilities that they let the cops know what city they are going to strike next! When the Mercedes Gang announces they are going to hit Marseilles, Emilien’s department is assigned to stop them.

Emilien’s boss is a buffoon who spends more time coming up with themed codenames for every aspect of an operation than actually figuring out what might work. He comes up with a sting operation where the cops, along with army snipers, stakeout a bank and wait for the gang to strike. Emilien’s general incompetence lets the gang escape unharmed and causes a huge pile-up and a shootout between the cops and some French security agents that just happen to be passing by. This first action scene sets the tone for most of the rest of the movie. It drags the focus away from the bank robbers, and it’s dramatically pointless because we know nobody can get hurt, what with there being no bad guys involved.


"Okay, I'll let you be Bo this time!"

Later Emilien busts Daniel for speeding after using his cab to get to work. (Daniel also deliberately caused a multi-car accident, but this is apparently not worth mentioning.) When Emilien realizes what a gear head Daniel is Emilien asks Daniel to consult on the Mercedes Gang case, which leads to a stakeout of a garage where the robbers must be getting parts.

The real meat of Taxi is the interactions between Daniel and Emilien, and those two and their respective love interests. Unfortunately for me, either most of the humor doesn’t translate well, or it’s of the long-winded verbal variety where you can tell what the punch line will be from the first line, but the characters keep talking forever before they get to it. Mostly I just watched the movie waiting for the next action scene (which never really came), tried to figure out what that thing is in Daniel’s hair (there’s a reason “French hip hop fashion” is an oxymoron), and enjoyed the ample charms of Marion Cotillard. I also had to roll my eyes at the surprisingly casual racial slurs that pepper the movie.


So, you say this is a French film?

The cleverest part of Taxi is the scene where we find out how the robbers are getting the money past police blockades. It turns out, they aren’t. When the “rob” the bank they actually just hide the money in the bank, then days later use the building’s janitor to get it out. That’s pretty neat, and would be a great idea in some other movie, but here it makes little sense. The robbers also get their cars past the police by quickly painting them different colors in a truck they already have in the area. Why not just take the money from the bank and hide it in the truck, which is apparently beyond police suspicion? I don’t know.


"We can make it! I saw it in a movie called Speed!"

And that’s the rub. Nothing either the cops or the robbers do ever makes sense. The cops seem to know which bank the robbers are going to hit next, yet they never make a move to stop the robbers from entering the bank and taking hostages. For their part, the robbers, laden with enough cash for them all to retire and on the run from the cops, are goaded by Daniel into a pointless and surprisingly soporific race that serves as the climax of Taxi.

Posted: Fri - August 20, 2004 at      

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