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D |
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| Story: |
N/A |
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| Acting: |
N/A |
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| Direction: |
N/A |
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| Visuals: |
N/A |
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Terrible
by Mike (movies profile)
Jul 17, 2007
57
of
89 people found this review helpful
Trying to sum this movie up in a single word, the first one that came to mind was "insipid". Taking Lives is one of those films where you wonder how it could get made and turn out like this without any of the talented people involved noticing it at some point along the way. It's well-acted, has impressive stunts, is competently directed and is quite stylish visually. But films of this nature live and die by the quality of the story and the pacing of the film, and this one comes up waaaay short on both counts. Not only is it slow, but anyone who read the script for this should have been able to spot the big problem a mile away: it's so obvious who the bad guy is, what's the point? That's what happens when you only have two potential suspects, one of whom gets about 7 minutes of screen time before he is killed by the other suspect. Not much left to guess at that point, except how much longer the film will keep us in "suspense" before the filmmakers finally fess up and tell us "yeah, he's the killer."
I was reminded of that line in Throw Mama From the Train where Billy Crystal tells Danny DeVito something like, "You wrote a five-page mystery called Murder at My Friend Harry's. There are only two characters in the story and one of them dies on page three." That about sums up the level of suspense in this film. That the people who greenlighted this movie could read the script and not notice this just amazes me.
To call this a "Hitchcockian-style suspense thriller" is to completely insult Alfred Hitchcock. Where his red herrings were genuinely twisty and confusing, anything passing for a twist in this film has a sort of "tacked on" feel that gives the impression the filmmakers just tossed it in the mix, hoping it might possibly throw some small portion of the audience off the all-too-obvious nature of the plot. You'd have to be pretty thick to fall for any of the so-called twists in this clunker.
On total, this is a flashy film with an appealing cast and virtually no substance to back it up. I'm not looking for Citizen Kane when I go to the movies, but I do appreciate it when the filmmakers avoid insulting my intelligence and Taking Lives comes up snake eyes on that roll. |
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