Dir. D.J Caruso, 2004, USA / Canada, 103 mins
Cast:
Angelina Jolie, Ethan Hawke, Olivier Martinez, Keifer Sutherland, Gena Rowlands
A serial murder thriller, set initially in 1983 but spending most of its time in 'present day' Canada, Taking Lives opens with a teenage boy arriving at a small town's bus station, parting with a wad of cash to get out of there and eyeing a slightly older man as he does so. He and the man end up on the bus next to each other and strike up conversation. All goes well - they share a sense of alienation, the older being weighed down by such clichés as an abusive stepfather and being forced to go to military school - until the boy brutally murders him and takes his wallet. When the time for murder comes the visual shocks are well delivered, but other events are set up and enacted by numbers. The ugly kid usually kills the cuter one in these stories, and so it is here.
In the hands of scriptwriter Andrew Kevin Walker and director David Fincher, this genre gave us one of the more compelling Hollywood films of the nineties - Se7en. Taking Lives is a tired imprint from that master, never more so than during the opening credits; not so much influenced by Se7en's ground-breaking Nine Inch Nails intro sequence as badly copied from it. Both glory in the aesthetics of forensics, but where Se7en's plotting was inventive Taking Live's is merely intricate, and where Se7en refined the level of Hollywood production and sound design, Taking Lives has cinematography and sound that are somewhere between competent and smart. This is of course a quite different thing from incompetence, but to find odd moments of script-derived power amid the lazy writing and stock characters makes the waste of talent the more troubling. To return to the highly contrived plot, we are now post-credits in contemporary Montreal. FBI Special Agent Scott (Jolie) is brought in to handle the case. We first see her lying in the grave of what turns out to be another of the killer's victims. Her darting, clear eyes, twitchy body movements, exaggerated breathing and sniffing inform us that she is attuned to her surroundings in a way the joke-figure French Canadian cops Paquette (Olivier Martinez), Duval (Jean-Hughes Anglade) and Leclerc (Tchéky Karyo) will never be. It doesn't avail her of the correct suspect, however, as the plot rolls and dives through intrigues involving the faded mother Mrs Asher (an enjoyable Rowlands) and her twin sons, the mysterious Hart (Sutherland, wasting his talents) and art dealer James Costa (Hawke, overplaying his). Jolie's performance has the odd moment of impassive power but generally looks as ludicrous as her lines sound.
The plotting, however, is at the heart of Taking Lives' weakness. Both filmmakers and cast have struggled with that now-familiar Hollywood device: the double plot twist. If things seem curiously set up in the first instance, that's because they are - all are playing people who are themselves playing roles. Come the double twist the obvious conclusion turns out to be the wrong one. This might have been an effective covering device for the film's many failings. But it's all so laboured that there is little to do but wonder what might be the final twist.
For a film so dependent on its plot for its structure, it is debilitatingly unconcerned with plotting and is instead focused on delivering moments of intensity. TV director DJ Caruso didn't film Taking Lives, he filmed the trailer. With such unconcern for the substance the style inevitably suffered. It does not matter how many smooth tracking moves or extreme close-ups on Hollywood flesh are offered, they can't rescue such miscasting (Jolie, Sutherland, Hawke), lame plotting, lines such as "so, it's over", first victims called John Doe, Agent Scott reclining in her bath surrounded by gratuitous scene of crime photos, a standard issue score by Philip Glass; an overwhelming wash of predictability from start to finish. Part of its predictable quality is the sensation of familiarity exuded to the audience by such expected tropes and events, part of it comes from the failure to maintain suspense. Within scenes the power to shock is certainly present, but shock is a thin diet - Psycho is not encapsulated by its shower scene.
Michael Caine has said that for any film to be great it must have a sense of place; for a thriller to thrill it must intrigue you not just with what happens but how, when, where and why. Taking Lives fails at these, partly because it failed to try for them.
Richard Dilks
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