Taking Lives

Dir: D.J. Caruso
2004
A dark’n’grimy slice of serial killer silliness, Taking Lives must have passed me by in the theaters. I don’t remember anything about this film when it came out, and the poster, which just features Angelina Jolie’s lips and not her eyes, looks like she’s being taken from behind, more of an erotic thriller.
This is one of those thrillers that makes sense as you watch it, especially as you try to keep up with its tangled web and red herrings, but in retrospect makes absolutely no sense at all. For such a brilliant profiler as Jolie’s Illeana Scott character is supposed to be, she actually fails to do her job, getting it all wrong, and several people die because of her. She eventually catches the killer and, as happens in these films, kills him with her own bare hands, but we’re asked to believe that a disgraced agent would still receive funding from her agency in order to lay a trap over six months later. What did she do with all that spare time, waiting for the killer to turn up? And when he finally does, why is she surprised? That was, indeed, her job.
So. Apart from that we get Quebec standing in for Montreal, a number of great French and French-Canadian actors slumming about, the challenge of seeing Keifer Sutherland and not hearing “I’m agent Frank Bauer of CTU” in your head, a nice shagging scene (unrated DVD only) designed for Jolie fans (and one that suggested right away that her lover is the killer, as nobody has a sex scene this late in a film without some ulterior motive). You also get the site of Gena Rowland’s head cut off in a elevator by a son who apparently carries around bone-cutting tools and a speedy working method–from then on the film lost me.