Ha ha and hollyhocks, it’s Burl reviewing
at you again! Now, what might you get if you took Silence of the Lambs and mixed it up with Se7en? Well, ha ha, you’d get any one of the dozens upon dozens of
rip-off serial killer pictures that came out in the 1990s and 2000s! Among
those hangdogs is Taking Lives, one
of the slicker and more big-budget of the imitators, but in its way as weak a
simulacrum as something like, oh, Red
Team!
Angelina Jolie, of the bee-stung lips,
plays the usual sort of FBI agent who has some preternatural insight into the
minds of serial killers, like Will Graham from Manhunter, and while it’s a talent she might rather not have,
she’ll grimly and doggedly use while she’s got it! She arrives in Montreal
(which is played in the movie interchangeably by both Montreal and Quebec City,
ha ha) to help the local constabulary track down a serial killer who was played
as a young lad by Paul Dano, but by now might look like just about anybody!
Why, he might look like Ethan Hawke, the
actor famed from Explorers, who here
plays a mild-mannered art gallerist who happens to have interrupted the killer
in the midst of his latest murder! Or he may resemble Kiefer Sutherland, whom
we know from Stand By Me and The Lost Boys, and who certainly acts
the part of a killer! Or he may look like some random nobody, or even one of
the cops, which is the twist I was
expecting! Only Gena Rowlands from Light
of Day and The Brink’s Job, knows
for sure, because the killer is her son, and though he’s long been thought
dead, she recently spotted him on a boat!
So I guess the whodunit angle is where the
picture tries to distinguish itself from the movies it’s modeled on, but the
dearth of suspects renders this distinction not much of one at all! Ha ha! The
Quebec locations, and a brand of Canadian-ness with the quality of having been
arrived at by way of the children’s game of Telephone (“I should have stayed in
Winnipeg!” Hawke’s character grouses at one point), give it a tiny sliver of
uniqueness though! Still, it’s strange that all the Quebec cops are played by
French actors: Tchéky Karyo from Kiss of
the Dragon, avuncular and wise; Olivier Martinez from IP5: The Island of Pachyderms, resentful and angry; Jean-Hugues
Anglade from Betty Blue, neutral and
doomed!
It’s pretty cookie-cutter stuff, and, ha ha, I can't see it being anyone's favourite movie! There’s a pretty fair boo-scare in there, and some
gross Special Makeup Effects, but these things are surrounded by an awful lot
of silliness! Ha ha, I give Taking Lives
one and a half horrible straw mattresses!
Thomas Harris was an excellent writer (maybe he still is, but he's retired, I think) but he did untold damage to thriller movies and the horror paperback industry. Thrillers all ended up with over-elaborate criminal masterminds as the bad guys, and almost overnight everyone switched from reading horror to countless Harris knock-offs. No sign of anything changing, either, even true crime stuff takes the Harris approach now.
ReplyDeleteWell, we can't be too hard on old Thomas - if it hadn't been him, it'd have been someone else! And anyway, we'll always have Black Sunday, ha ha!
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