taxi

Luc Besson is a director/writer I have a bit of a mixed reaction too.

He's made some stuff I've really liked - Nikita, Fifth Element, The first Transporter - and other stuff, like the Transporter sequels, I've really struggled with.  Taxi is probably a perfect example of the later.

There's a lot to like in the film - some interesting characters, some really great car chases, some nice funny stuff - and a lot that just doesn't work.  The problem for me is that one of the key things that doesn't work is the plot.  And for me, plot is one of the key elements of film.

Don't get me wrong, visual spectacle is one of the things that makes cinema an amazing art form and I'll happily watch something that's just purely visually interesting.  Trouble is a film like this they're trying to make the plot more important than that, and, to be frank, the plot was a horrible pastiche of bits of ideas pinched from other films and stuck together in a way that can only really be described as rubbish.

Also, I have to say the acting was rather hammy.  One of the things I always noticed with Hong Kong cinema was the hammy over-acting.  Everyone would over-act all the time.  If you were a bad guy you'd slope around making mean faces and being all menacing all the time.

Taxi seems to have the same bug (I specifically used HK as an example as Taxi seems really heavily influenced by HK cinema).  It doesn't feel natural or real or even like it's vaguely attempting to be either.  And it doesn't really even work as camp or something like that.

Tonally it just feels odd.

Also, there are lots of stupid bits in it that don't make sense.  For example, there's one bit where the guy says he'll be back in a couple of hours and it's clearly the best part of a day before he returns.  Now to be fair it's part of an ongoing gag, but even so, why he takes the best part of a day to return isn't clear.  There'd have been loads of chances for him to pop back for a few hours or call - he wasn't tied up in a basement or anything.

I'm being very harsh on the film.  It has a lot of fine Luc Besson stuff in it, and it's punchy and amusing and quite diverting, it's just that it feels lazily and haphazardly written and a lot of it doesn't make any real sense.  It's predictable, hackneyed and a bit lazy, to be frank.