New York Taxi

This is the American version of the French Taxi films and it suffers in comparison.

I'm not kidding when I say that this a remake of the three French films since although the film is mainly a poor remake of the the first film, it lifts sequences from the second and third films.

Its a mess, a real mess. I'm a huge huge fan of the French films, and for me there was no real point in my seeing this since anything that worked came from the originals.

Why did they bother? They changed the sex of the lead (though the Queen is excellent), combined others and rewrote the cops mother to the point of stupidness. They lost any sense of timing and connection...they should have started from the ground up.

Its not the painfully awful film that some reviews made it out to be, but it is a waste of time. If you can find the originals and watch those. That should take you the better part of 5 hours and in the end you will not feel as though you've wasted your life.

3 out of 10.

TAXI is the American remake of the quirky 1998 Luc Besson comedy. While the core of the film is still oriented around fast cars, hot chicks and zany humour, the film's light-hearted French comedic ambiance has been replaced with a dirtier, more strident, and somewhat more serious American action-comedy feel, which, although it tries hard, doesn't quite translate as it should. Queen Latifah leads as Belle Williams, a taxi driver who runs a souped-up Ford around the meaner streets of the city. Jimmy Fallon plays the unco New York cop who lands in her cab one day in pursuit of a bunch of foxy Brazilian bank robbers. Together, they muddle through car-crashes, shoot-outs and weirdly-decorated apartments to bring crooks to justice. While the plot sounds like a good premise for a decent comedy, the film is sorely lacking in script composition. The one-liners are crap, the jokes feel forced, and the script, which alternates between taking itself too seriously and sheer stupidity, does no justice whatsoever to the energetic and talented cast. A major disappointment from what looked to be a brilliant film. Someone should remake it in six more years - with a little more skill, I hope.

Washburn is an undercover cop who, after yet another job ending in a crashed car, has his license taken away and put back on the street. Meanwhile cycle courier Belle has finally gotten her taxi license and is preparing her souped up vehicle for the New York City streets. When a bank robbery in progress is called in, Washburn commandeers Belle's cab and gets involved in a high-speed chase with a group of Brazilian supermodels in a red BMW. Thrown off the case by the FBI, Washburn wants to catch the gang to get his job back, while Belle agrees to help so that she can get her taxi out of lockup.

I quite liked the original for what it was so I decided to give this film a try to see if it could manage to be fun. I'll be honest and say that the trailer attracted me because it had car chases, a bit of a laugh and some faux-lesbian teasing – there, gone are my 'art-house' credentials! I hoped that these elements could be kept fun and that the film could have a spark to it in some area that would raise it above the genre and actually make it fun to watch. Sadly I was wrong and my worries about the effort put into this film were realized in the first few minutes of the film where a skinny person on a bike is revealed to be Belle – even though their body shapes could not be more different! With this lack of attention to detail I did not have high hopes but I figured I was being picky and tried to get past it. However from here on in everything is exactly as you would expect – lacking imagination and effort in almost every regard.

The plot is nonsense but to pick on that is to be too demanding because none of us expected anything too cohesive or logical but suffice to say that attempts to build stories around the characters are all flat and uninteresting. However what I did need from the film was action, excitement, comedy and spark. The action is OK but nothing special – the use of CGI cars to make impossible stunts really takes away from the impact of the action, while the limitations of the busy streets means that the car chases are very tightly cut and never feel real and impressive. This reduces how excited the audience can feel and me and the other 15 people in the cinema sat rather impassive for most of the action scenes. With this OK, then the comedy needed to match it to produce an OK film, but it didn't. Not at all. The comedy is partly based on that wonderful comic device – that black people are cool and sassy while white people are geeky and uptight. Oh, how I never tire of seeing racial stereotypes enforced in the name of comedy. With this old chestnut wheeled out again, the rest of the comedy falls into line and I never really laughed more than once. The button pushing and lack of imagination continues with the robbers themselves who are nothing more than legs and skin who are there to attract an idiotic and salivating male audience (ie – me) on the promise of titillation. They don't deliver this very well at all and the scenes where they try to feel cheap, tacky and exploitative instead of sexy and fresh.

The cast are lumbered with the material but they don't do as much as perhaps they could have done to make it better. Fallon is annoying and geeky – simply filling the 'white' cliché in the 'cool black/geeky white' combo. Latifah continues to just play the easy ethnic cliché stuff for every penny.

I don't know if she is like this in real life but I must admit that I do find her ethnic cliché to be lazy and rather offensive – her smart-mouth, impatience and speed to violence has been in many of her last few roles and I don't think it is the best use of her position, but then again if you put money in front of me then I'd probably do the same. Esposito is pretty wasted in a thankless role before being used as a piece of meat for the sake of selling the film to the male audience (yes, yes, I admit it). The models are nothing but eye candy and I didn't think they did it very well.

Overall this is not a terrible film because it will appeal to boys and young teenagers with its noisy mix of unattainable leggy women, fast cars, basic humour and racial stereotyping; the target audience for this is shown even in the cut – which removes a use of the MF word so that it can get to a younger audience. For me though I found it lacking any sort of imagination, spark or wit and instead just took the easy line of cliché, stereotype and noise. It will appeal to some, but not to me, and it was an effort to get to the end.

A stupid detective that is not a good driver uses a terrific taxi driver, who dreams to be a pilot of racing car, to chase four bank robbers in a BMW. With this simple story line, "Taxi" is a very silly movie, but I laughed a lot. The greatest attraction for me was certainly the debut of the Brazilian top model Gisele Bündchen as "actress". But indeed Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon carry this dumb, ridiculous and absurd story in a very funny way. Another funny situation for the Brazilian viewers is to hear Ana Cristina de Oliveira speaking Portuguese with a strong accent from Portugal as if she were Brazilian. I laughed a lot with her pronunciation in Portuguese, which sounds very funny for us. I totally disagree with comments like "the worst movie ever made", probably made by persons without sense of humor as commented by another IMDb user. "Austin Powers" movies, just as an example, are dumber and less funny than "Taxi". If the viewer does not have much expectation about this film, he or she may probably have a good time. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Taxi"

You know going in to this one that its just for the laughs. I really enjoyed "Taxi". They were in the garage with the nitrous, I almost came out of my seat laughing so hard. The actually taxi cab is better eye candy than the three model/bank robbers. I thought the new idea of how to get the money without being caught was clever. I also liked that Jimmy Fallon thought Jen Espositos character was madly in love with him. While she totally blew him off. Queen Latifah I always like,she gives it attitude w/a lil ummph. The music had you jumping,exciting to see what was coming up. The action was good because it wasn't overdone. The dialogue I thought was well balanced. I am not a fan of when they talk to much before something happens. If you like SNL you'll be the type wanting to see "taxi" over & over & over.

There wasn't much to ponder in the movie. Ahhh, who cares?? It was an excellent time. One I think you should share with a group of friends, then laugh over dinner.