Review by Donner

20th Century Fox Presents
Taxi

He's armed, but she's dangerous

Reviewed 11.2.04

Directed by Tim Story

Screenplay by Robert Ben Garant & Thomas Lennon and Jim Kouf

Based on an earlier screenplay by Luc Besson

Starring Queen Latifah, Jimmy Fallon, Ann-Margret, Ana Cristina De Oliveira, and Jennifer Esposito

FUN FACT: This movie was Loosely based on the 1998 version of Taxi, a French film written by Luc Besson in 30 days while waiting for Columbia Pictures to commit to the production go-ahead for The Fifth Element.

Here's a hint for you prospective script writers and actors out there.  If you write a script or read a comedy script and do not laugh, chances are that the script isn't funny and it's extremely unlikely that the end result will be funny.  This is a movie you shouldn't write... and it's a movie that you shouldn't be in.

Taxi is one such movie... a film that starts out as unfunny, gets unfunnier, and finishes in the most unfunniest state possible.  In case you still care about this gaping maw of unfunny, Taxi tells the tale of a cop without a driver's license who joins forces with a sassy taxi cab driver to catch supermodel bank robbers.

No, I'm really not kidding.

Starring Jimmy Fallon who proves that he's still not ready for prime-time or anything else that isn't the equally unfunny Saturday Night Live plays the cop in question and is probably one of of the least funny funnymen I've seen in the movies in a long time.  Does he have a good role in his future?  Who knows... if Taxi is any indication, he should just go back and beg Lorne Michaels for his job back because thanks about the only thing that he's remotely "good" at.  His character in this movie has got to be the worst character of the year in any movie.

Queen Latifah isn't that much better... playing the same old clichéd sassy but intelligent black woman that she's played over and over and over again from Bringing Down the House to Barbershop 2 and even the upcoming Beauty Shop.  She's quickly proving to be a one-note pony.

Taxi is such a huge miscalculation that it's not even funny... in fact, not being funny is the problem.  Fallon isn't funny, Latifah isn't funny, the script isn't funny, and the setup isn't funny.  In fact, I'm not sure how anything in this movie could remotely even be considered funny by anyone at all.  I've never seen the original version of Taxi so I could be wrong, but I don't see how.

Taxi was just a big studio movie that forsakes funny for star power and turns out to be nothing but non-stop stupidity.  Let me just put it this way, if you're dying of brain cancer and only have two hours to live, see this movie... it will stretch those two hours out into an eternity.