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TAKING
LIVES
3/10
USA
2004 : D.J. CARUSO : 103 mins
'Taking Liberties',
more like, so clunkily and daft is this high-concept serial-killer misfire.
The (not-unintriguing) gimmick this time has the murderer adopting the
identity of each new victim in turn, moving from life to life, we're told,
"like a hermit-crab." So, when top FBI agent Illeanna Scott
(Angelina Jolie) arrives in Montreal to investigate a grisly slaying,
she's faced with no end of potential suspects who may not be who they
seem: nervy gallery-owner Costa (Ethan Hawke), who claims to have witnessed
the crime; shadowy Hart (Kiefer Sutherland), who matches Costa's description
of the culprit to a T; even macho local cop Paquette (Olivier Martinez)
isn't above suspicion, fuming as he is with resentment at Illeanna's arrival.
Taking
Lives is a bad picture, but takes itself far too seriously to fall
into the 'guilty-pleasure' category of pictures like The
Butterfly Effect, which make a virtue of their implausibility
and ludicrousness. Jolie and Hawke come across as if they seriously think
this pulpy nonsense is going to land them further trips to the Oscars
- and even they fare better than the likes of Sutherland and Gena Rowlands
(as the killer's distraught but steely mother) whose screen-time is rather
insultingly limited to cameo brevity.
Although Caruso
predictably has little idea what to do with Rowlands, (apart from shoot
her from off-putting overhead angles), she does emerge as one of the film's
very few plusses. Another is the use of Montreal locations: as in Hitchcock's
I Confess and the more recent The
Score, this photogenic city appears as itself, rather than, as
in many Hollywood productions, standing in for a more expensive-to-use
American metropolis.
But Caruso
proceeds to torpedo Montreal's positive impact on the movie by filling
several key roles with French actors (Martinez, Tcheky Karyo, Jean-Hugues
Anglade) rather than Quebecois (whose 'joual' accent is assez
different). And while subtitles are used on occasion, there are several
one-on-one exchanges between the Quebecois flics which are inexplicably
conducted in heavily-accented English. And there's an especially lame
'gag' in which Paquette bad-mouths Illeanna in his native tongue, only
to be unconvincingly startled when she suddenly reveals that "elle
parle Francais."
It isn't hard
to see why Taking Lives was made, of course: based on a novel by
Michael Pye, it provides an old-fashioned kind of star vehicle for Jolie
as the hyper-intuitive (and exceedingly glamorous) Ms Scott, who's like
a cross between Sherlock Holmes, Clarice Starling and Linda Evangelista.
And Jolie has of course had previous successes in this sub-Se7en vein
with the likes of Philip Noyce's The Bone Collector.
But Caruso
doesn't even reach the kind of by-the-numbers competence of a Noyce, tricking
up the picture with all sorts of gratuitously arty camera angles and amping
up Amir Mokri's atmospheric cinematography to a distracting degree: there
haven't been such relentlessly dark interiors since the heyday of The
X-Files. Even the presence of such august behind-the-camera figures
as editor Anne V Coates and composer Philip Glass (who turns in a relatively
uninspired Hitchockian score) isn't enough to compensate for the shortcomings
of Caruso and scriptwriter Jon Bokenkamp - indeed, having such names on
board raises expectations which the film never comes close to matching.
And despite
Caruso's shortcomings it's Bokenkamp who's emphatically the real miscreant
in Taking Lives. His screenplay is at once thuddingly implausible
and grindingly predictable: most viewers will be able to weed out the
red herrings and identify the killer (thus negating suspense) several
reels before the supposedly brilliant Illeana cracks the case. Even then
we still have an unfortunate distance left to limp, through a tedious
series of climaxes until a laughable final showdown that makes no sense
in retrospect and even at the time rings as hollow as so much else that's
gone before. By this stage Caruso and Bokenkamp have gone beyond even
'Taking Liberties'... Taking the Piss, perhaps?
23rd April,
2004
(seen 22nd April : UCI, MetroCentre, Gateshead : press show)
by Neil
Young
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