Release Date: March 19, 2004
Starring: Angelina Jolie, Ethan Hawke, Olivier Martinez, Kiefer Sutherland
Directed by: D.J. Caruso
Written by: Jon Bokenkamp
Distributed by: Warner Brothers
MPAA Rating: R (strong violence including disturbing images, langauge, some sexuality)
My favorite part of serial-killer movies is the scene when the detectives enter the killer’s lair for the first time. It usually comes about halfway through the movie and it is usually the only truly original part of the film (because otherwise these movies boil down to police procedurals, a genre that has been remorselessly strip-mined over the past century or so). It is the part of the movie that is the creepiest, because Hollywood serial killers always hide their psychoses beneath a thin veneer of normalcy; they are not beyond-the-pale crazies, just fun-house mirror images of you and me. So the scene when the detectives enter the killer’s den, or hideout, or apartment, for the first time is when we get a fresh, spine-tingling, hair-raising look at the sort of madness that regular human beings can dream up and screenwriters can put on paper.
This sort of skin-crawling excitement is otherwise absent from Taking Lives, director D.J. Caruso’s underwhelming follow-up to his stylish noir thriller The Salton Sea. It is about an FBI profiler who is assigned to a Canadian case involving a serial murderer who assumes the identities of his victims after he kills them, and in fact specifically selects his prey because they match his general likeness. This unique behavior, which one character likens to that of a hermit crab, is unfortunately rendered about as exciting as a PBS special on hermit crabs by Caruso and screenwriter Jon Bokenkamp. It has all of the genre’s usual tricks: the stock montages of crime-scene forensics, a handful of “jumper” moments, and the cloying suspense of wondering whodunit, but none of the actual never-before excitement that would make a movie like this worth seeing.
As a case in point, I turn to Se7en, David Fincher’s benchmark serial killer thriller from 1995, which has set the bar almost unreachably high for movies of this type with its fleshed-out characters, unforgettable murder scenes, crackling dialogue, and a raw dynamic between the police officers on the case and the serial killer they are chasing. It is also, coincidentally, the movie that Caruso has clearly used as his mold for Taking Lives, something that is especially apparent in the opening-credits sequence, wherein the titles are laid over visceral, cringe-inducing close-ups of everyday activities: a man shaving, putting his contact lenses in, and so on.
It is a disappointingly unoriginal beginning for a director who showed plenty of style in his last feature, The Salton Sea, although he does rescue the movie from a complete lack of distinction later on. The movie’s heroine is an FBI agent named Illeana, played by Angelina Jolie, and shortly after she arrives in Montréal to assist in the investigation (to the displeasure of one of the local detectives, a cop named Paquette played by Olivier Martinez), a witness turns up. His name is James Costa (Ethan Hawke), and he claims to have seen what the killer looks like -- the authorities’ first positive identification in a case that spans over 10 years. The police interrogate Costa, and throughout this scene, director Caruso shows a keen interest in the minutest features of his actors’ bodies: he zooms in on an earlobe, a lip, an eye, a fingernail, and so on, with almost no discernable pattern except a fascination with the details of the human form.
But touches like these are feeble protestations by a director who is forced to work with a very pedestrian script, which itself was based on the novel of the same name by Michael Pye. The story’s first major drawback is that it gives up any pretense of being a gruesome, physiological horror and settles for peddling the tired pulp fiction hallmarks of the police procedural, such as the distrust between the local police and the FBI (although Olivier Martinez’s somewhat effeminate French Canadian accent hampers his ability to play the tough cop; it’s impossible to believe that anyone takes him seriously). It almost goes without saying that Illeana will fall in love with Costa, because he is a good-looking and seemingly helpless near-victim, and empowered female protagonists always go for the wounded-dog men in these movies. It also goes without saying, though, that Costa’s survival is not all that it seems, and neither is he, and that Illeana will have to pay for her involvement with him (the only questions -- ones the film breathlessly cannot wait to answer -- are when, and how much).
This gets to the second of the film’s two major drawbacks (which is connected to the first): crushed under the weight of convention as it is, Taking Lives ultimately succumbs to the modern suspense thriller’s insatiable desire for a glut of narrative twists. Actually, the word “twist” doesn’t do justice to the numerous, sometimes random about-faces that pop up in the third act; these are severe enough to induce whiplash. It is possible to guess the final ending, but only by choosing the least likely, most arbitrary course of action -- that is, none of the twists have any basis within the story, only within the context of Hollywood’s perception of the genre. Thrillers must have surprise endings, studio execs seem to think, and so they churn out badly misleading storylines -- in which, for instance, characters will say or do certain things that are then crossed-up in the all-is-revealed finale -- that will only float with the most susceptible, most gullible of audiences.
Much will be made of Angelina Jolie’s appearance in this movie, for this is one of her rarer feminine turns, which is to say she does not play a kick-butt video game heroine or a sex object. But in truth she seems like an afterthought; this is no more a Jolie movie than it is a Kiefer Sutherland movie (that actor receives prominent billing for a part that amounts to no more than 10 minutes). Lucky for her, though. In the future, Taking Lives will be an afterthought in her career, and if she learns anything from the experience, it’s probably that the mundane police thrillers with female leads like this are best left to somebody like Ashley Judd.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)