”
Taking Lives
”
doesn’t make up for its shortcomings through any particularly
notable acting from its lead. The story is about FBI Special Agent
Scott (Angelina Jolie), who is brought in to help the Montreal
police track down a serial killer whose latest victim has been
recently discovered.
“Taking Lives” doesn’t make up for its shortcomings through any particularly notable acting from its lead. The story is about FBI Special Agent Scott (Angelina Jolie), who is brought in to help the Montreal police track down a serial killer whose latest victim has been recently discovered.
Using her acute observation skills, plus the testimony of an American gallery owner (Ethan Hawke) who witnessed one of the murders, Scott spends most of her time trying to get inside the mind of the killer, whose motives are simplified down to the need to live other people’s lives because of a self-loathing that was imparted on him from his mother (Gena Rowlands).
The preview for “Taking Lives” is so intent on showing us who the murderer is that the executives in charge must have thought that by selling the film’s predictability they may in fact help keep the actual story unpredictable.
The first thing they need to do is stop underestimating their audiences, who go into the film full well knowing that things are not what they seem.
The second thing they need to do is realize that red herrings in thrillers need to be plausible and can’t just be thrown into a story for shock purpose. It always seems to me that the filmmakers do this in desperate attempts to keep the audiences guessing. It needs to be pointed out that a surprise twist is not inherent to a good thriller, and the more there are, the worse it can get.
The relationship between the protagonist and the antagonist can be developed in a far more engaging fashion when the plot isn’t overburdened by narrative tangents that orient the viewer in multiple, contradictory directions. If you enjoyed the tension between Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in “Heat,” then you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Ultimately, the point here is that “Taking Lives” only really becomes interesting once we know who the killer is and our relationship to the film is redefined by this knowledge. The characters suddenly seem vulnerable, psychologically complex, even perverse, and it makes the tension skyrocket. This is upsetting, because at this point the film is almost over, and the best parts are only just developing.
The opening of the film deserves its due credit and is admittedly a genuinely unsettling sequence that takes us back to the serial killer’s first murder. It also displays an understanding of how pacing and sound design are instrumental to building tension. Unfortunately, the rest of the film fails to recapture the same qualities that are exhibited in the introduction.
Notable is Gena Rowlands, whose character is obviously far more complex than the space given to her by the screenwriter. Rowlands needs to find a director who can offer her the same kind of psychological depth that Aronofsky gave to Ellen Burstyn in the brilliant “Requiem for a Dream.” Here, Rowlands is only on screen for a combined 10 minutes, but still turns in the film’s only memorable performance.
Jolie, who used to be in good movies and has certainly proven to be a great actress when the occasion demands, is stuck playing a textbook “I’m quirky and intellectually superior to all these incompetent men” role that is more annoying than empowering. She only connects with us once she is emotionally vulnerable.
The ending, of course, offers one last shocker that, unlike revealing the killer’s identity (predictable a mile away), is actually rooted in plausibility and psychological complexity motivated by the characters.
But a tense beginning and a thrilling ending do not a tense thriller make, and we would have been done a much better service by the filmmaker had the pseudo-climax that occurs about 15 minutes before the end of the film actually happened, dare I say, half-way through the film, so that the heart of the conflict between Jolie’s relationship to the killer could be explored in all of its latent perversion over a more substantial length of time.
