Taking Lives Movie Download

3 / 10

Caution — Serial Killer at Work.
The Canadian film industry has an illustrious history of producing subsidized documentaries and rather slow, thoughtful commercial movies. This one doesn’t fit the mold.

The killer offs one victim after another and assumes their identities because he can’t bear the fact that his Mom preferred his twin and he can’t stand being himself. (Got that?) Angelina Jolie is Illeana, an FBI agent and friend of someone on the Montreal police force who is asked to help out in the case.

There has been a witness to the latest murder, a scared young man who is an artist, Ethan Hawke. Jolie falls for him. The police use him as bait to trap the killer. I’m not sure how that arrangement developed because I found myself a little confused on a few points, this one included. No matter. The man everyone believes to be the murderer, Kiefer Southerland, has about ten minutes of screen time, two of which he spends dead. Case solved, right? So Jolie and Hawke are free to consummate their mutual attraction. They do it in a raw scene in which it is unclear whether Hawke is consuming Jolie or the other way around.

But — hold on. For some reason, and I say this only because this is another point that left me bemused and wondering if my synapses had shorted out, Hawke reveals himself as the murderer and traps his mother (Gena Rowlands) in an empty elevator. “All I ever wanted was your love,” he tells her tenderly just before he slaughters her and saws her head off.

Jolie is fired from the FBI for “egregious poor judgment” and retires to an isolated and thoroughly desolate farm house outside of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She appears to be preposterously pregnant with Hawke’s child. Well, when a babe lives alone and helpless and a killer out there is interested in her, we know what will develop. The last ten climactic minutes turn into a woman-in-jep movie. Hawke shows up, throws Jolie around, and finally stabs her in her swollen belly with a pair of scissors. She promptly pulls them out and plunges the scissors into his heart. As Hawke is standing there looking puzzled at his protruding scissors, she reveals that she’s not pregnant at all. It’s just a foam rubber bladder or something. The whole thing was a trap set by Jolie and the police to catch Hawke. There’s no explanation of why she needed the scissors when Jolie, the actress, could have simply vaporized her attacker with her sexual heat.

It’s interesting to listen to what Philip Glass, my man, does with the score for an ordinary serial-killer flick. He stretches every ligament to suit his fulgurating minimalism to the demands of trash. A hand reaches out of the darkness and claps Jolie on the shoulder and the act is accompanied by a loud dissonant crash.

Jolie is magnetic. Not just because of her collagenated lips or her huge, knowing eyes, but because she’s a presence whenever she’s on screen, which is most of the time. Yet I can’t think of a single outstanding performance from her, or an exceptional film that she’s ever appeared in. I wish she’d get more demanding material.

Ethan Hawke is uninteresting. My judgment about these things is perforce humble but he doesn’t seem handsome, and his acting is no better than adequate. And, my God, if this movie needs ANYTHING, it needs a great villain to make up for the ordinariness of the script and the other characters.

It’s well photographed and good use is made of locations, and the supporting cast is pretty good. The opening scenes are nicely done too.

But the credits. How did this fad ever get started? Crudely typed letters jiggle on the screen, alternating with shots of a few words from a newspaper headline, and there is this loud, scratchy, metallic, buzzing, jangling music, as if recorded in a lumber mill, to set your nerves on edge in a cheap sort of way.

I don’t know. Is it possible to see just one serial killer flick too many?Read More