Taking Lives review

2004.04.06 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole

Taking Lives isn't a bad movie for the first hour or so, perhaps more. It's a fairly tight gotcha thriller for a while that probably looked great on paper, where a writer can write things like "a shadowy figure steps out of the darkness," and nobody can question it.

Only when you're directing it do you realize that you can't actually have a stuntman dressed in black step out of the darkness without it seeming gimmicky and giving away the fact that you're hiding the identity of the guy the audience is supposed think they already know. Only... DJ Caruso hasn't learned that yet.

Caruso directs a screenplay by newcomer Jon Bokencamp, adapted from a novel by Michael Pye. Caruso comes from television, where he mostly directed cop shows, and this movie has a lot of that look, including the repetitive use of interior sets, atmosphere generated mostly by spooky music, and investigators poking around dark crime scenes with flashlights.

Angelina Jolie plays an American FBI profiler who gets called to Montreal by an old friend to resolve a murder. She's the typical half-psychic death-obsessed serial-killer-tracker-downer we've seen a dozen times before (altho, allow me to reiterate that she is Angelina freaking Jolie). Another murder is committed conveniently quickly, establishing a pattern in which the killer assumes the identity of his victim. But it appears now that the killer is getting sloppy: he's left a witness. Ethan Hawke is the witness, looking good and seeming smoother than I've seen him before, not that there's any real chemistry between him and Jolie.

The French Canadian detectives on the case are nice finds; serious-looking guys with cool accents whom I wish we saw more of in the movies; they are given nothing to do. Somewhere down the line, Kiefer Sutherland shows up. It's not giving anything away to mention my Kiefer Sutherland Theory: Always bet against Kiefer Sutherland.

There's some general movie thriller silliness: several instances in which a person is mysteriously already in a room when another character enters and yet doesn't get noticed (including an elevator!), some gratuitous funhouse jolts, and a convenient crowd for the baddy to get lost in.

It's too bad, because there's a good thriller in there somewhere, with a mysterious secret in the killer's childhood (never explored), some intriguing give-and-take among the male French Canadian detectives and the solitary American female FBI agent (left on the table), as well as a possible romantic past (some assembly required).

But the dead bodies and swapped identities quickly become confusing, and things go haywire near the end and get farther fetched than any dog ever fetched before. There's actually a race down a stairwell to beat an elevator, for one thing. Blood, DNA, fingerprint, and dental evidence that could clear up everything is mysteriously late in arriving (actually, show one photo to one character early on and solve the crime instantly). And we get a revisionist hypothetical flashback of the sort that CSI is over-fond of doing that rewrites a scene we've already seen.

Even so, the film would have worked as a weak potboiler if only it hadn't been for the laughable conclusion. Before it ends, Taking Lives veers into Naked Gun territory that gets more laughs than... well, Naked Gun.

Note: Philip Glass scored, giving him three current films and two more due to be released by year's-end, proving that there is a future in Hollywood for atonal jazz hacks.

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