Man, David Fincher’s got a lot to answer for…
Thanks to the uncomprising and thrilling misery-trawl known as Se7en, serial killer movies seemed to change overnight in order to take in a whole new slew of murderers with distinct M.O.s and fucked up reasonings. If you think I’m exaggerating, you only have to sit through the very familiar-looking opening title sequence of Taking Lives to see what I mean.
Released in 2004 and seemingly stoking the serial killer-hunting flames within Angelina Jolie that were first lit by The Bone Collector, Taking Lives sees D.J. Caruso throw his hat into the psycho-thriller ring by offering up yet another grade-A nutjob who has sprinkled in a little of The Talented Mr. Ripley to go with his John Doe and Buffalo Bill flavored gumbo. But even with Ethan Hawke along for the ride, can this film actually bring anything new to a cluttered genre other than some flamboyant behavioral pattens?
An opening flashback introduces us to Martin Asher, a troubled young loner traveling across Qubec in 1983, who bonds with the more outgoing Matt during his journey. Outspoken and determined, Matt seems to be everything thing that Martin isn’t, and so when he least expects it, Martin shoves his new friend in front of a passing car and finishes him off with a rock. The reason? It seems that Martin admires Matt’s life so much, he just thought he’d take it, and we soon discover that this was only the first example of Martin changing identities as much as I change the TV channel when there’s fuck-all on.
21 years later, we meet creepily dedicated FBI profiler, Illeana Scott, as she chills in an open grave to get a feel for her prey. She’s been summoned to Montreal by SPVM Inspector LeClair in order to aid them in apprehending a serial killer who has been traveling undetected across the Northern United States by assuming the identities of those he kills. When Illeana isn’t lying enigmatically in holes in the ground, she has graphic photos of murder victims strewn around her hotel room to help her focus, but she finds her attention drawn when she meets potential victim, James Costa.
It seems that he could be the key to cracking this case wide open as he seemingly stumbled across the killer while in the middle of his grim work, and even tried to heroically resuscitate the victim after the killer fled despite his face being noticably crushed. Touched by his vulnerability, Illeana soon finds herself getting protective of this art dealer even though she knows it’s a horrendous idea, and matters get even messier when it seems that the identity-absorbing Martin Asher may have chosen James to be the next persona he takes.
However, in a post-Se7en world, things are rarely this simple, and while the feelings Illeana and James have for each other grow, things get ever more unpredictable.
OK, that’s something of a lie. As it stands, Taking Lives actually proves to be fairly predictable, as I seemed to be a step ahead of this listless thriller almost every step of the way. Skillfully avoiding the relentless innovation of The Silence Of The Lambs, the mounting dread of Se7en, or the wit of The Talented Mr. Ripley (it doesn’t even have The Bone Collector’s paraplegic Denzel Washington), Caruso’s psycho drama plods when it should sprint and signposts a lot of its twists and turns clearer than an overachieving sat nav. However, what it does has is an early appearance by Paul Dano (as a young incarnation of the killer, naturally), the director’s habit of aggressively totalling cars out of nowhere and both Jolie and Hawke trying to eke out what they can out of the material. Still, there’s the odd good (if nonsensical) jump scare and no shortage of mangle-faced corpses, but for the most part, Taking Lives just takes liberties.
It all starts out interesting enough, with a Paul Dano-starring prologue giving the actor an early boost when it comes to playing blank-eyed lunatics, but after he scores his first major kill and discovers that his life is much more fun if he simply becomes someone else, we zip ahead to the present day to find that Caruso’s mining all the usual tropes whether they make sense or not. Jolie’s FBI agent is obviously a driven woman with a Thomas Harris sense of intuition when it comes to serial slayers, but it’s hard to take all the weirdo behavior seriously when it looks like she’s also the sort of person who is similarly obsessed with keeping her pencil-thin eyebrows immaculately plucked. I know it’s a movie, and Jolie is nicely ernest in the role, but for us to believe that she’s the sort of professional kook who gains inspiration from sprawling in fresh graves and pins murder pics on the ceiling while she has a bath, it’s a little distracting that she looks as effortlessly stunning as she does.
The same could be said of Ethan Hawke’s dude in distress, who finds himself inadvertently thrust into the orbit of a serial killer simply by accident; but again, while he throws himself into the role with a genuine sense of wide-eyed vulnerability, the script simply isn’t able to pull off a tightly constructed thriller while pulling the sort of erotic baseline you would have gotten in the early 90s. Aside from most of the cops having French accents, the movie doesn’t really make the most of its Canadian surroundings and despite both Jolie and Hawke visibly trying their best, their romance feels like plot contrivance rather than a genuine connection. However, hats off to Kiefer Sutherland who barely shows up for five minutes, delivers an unconvincing red herring and then somehow gets third billing over Tchéky Karyo and Olivier Martinez – I think his agent may be the real criminal here…
However, you almost feel that Caruso realises that the pace and plot are lacking a certain bite, because he starts throwing in technically effective, but thematically baffling jump scares to punch things up. A body tumbling out of a roof carries the scent of the head-in-the-boat scene from Jaws, but another moment that sees a Friday The 13th style jolt delivered by a threat hiding under a bed in a hidden room that just doesn’t make sense – why is the killer just chilling out under a bed in his old bedroom/cell? How would he know that an FBI agent would suddenly break in and lay on that exact bed on a whim? And why jump out at her if you could just as easily get away undetected by simply doing nothing? What’s worse is that I pretty much figured out the entire twist within the first twenty minutes and I wasn’t even trying to, and I even correctly deduced Scott’s final ploy in the rather overlong epilogue.
A good, creepy concept is undone by a serial killer chiller that simply can’t live up to the potential of its opening scene, or rebound from being inexplicably bookended by U2 songs (U2? In a serial killer movie?). The only exceptional thing about Taking Lives is that it succeeds in proving why Se7en has endured all these years, while it’s pretenders molder in forgotten graves, waiting to be unearthed by a random streaming search.
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