Review: Taking Lives


A serial killer in Montreal appears to be stealing victims’ identities, and for some oddball reason the local cops are ill-equipped to handle the case on their own, so Tcheky Karyo calls in his friend Angelina Jolie, an FBI agent who specialises in these kinds of cases (her methods are a little eccentric even for this kind of character- lying in an empty grave etc.) Olivier Martinez and Jean-Hughes Anglade play the other investigating cops, the former a cranky chauvinist pig, the latter less so. Ethan Hawke is the frightened witness to one of the crimes (now fearing his own demise), who uses his skills as an artist (he owns a gallery) to draw the killer’s face, and whom Jolie is attracted to. Kiefer Sutherland turns up intermittently as numero uno suspect (apparently a client of Hawke’s), and Gena Rowlands is terrific as an elderly woman who thinks her estranged son, supposedly one of the victims, is in fact not dead and is believed to be a dangerous person. Oh, did I mention he was one of twins?



2004 D.J. Caruso (“The Salton Sea”) killer thriller gives Jolie a fair bit to do, Hawke has rarely been better, and it is certainly more effective than the likes of “Twisted”, “Suspect Zero”, or Jolie’s own “The Bone Collector”. The killer certainly isn’t as easy to guess as in the case of the former stinker, but that’s only because the killer’s M.O. allows him/her to practically be anyone, thus the audience is misdirected on a few occasions. So even though you might guess the actor or even the character (the list of suspects isn’t terribly large), can you be sure that it’s actually that character and not someone else impersonating them, if you catch my drift? It’s a nifty twist on the usual serial killer thing, at any rate.



Unfortunately, credibility goes out the window in the final third, with one ridiculous car crash in particular sticking in my craw. Also, Martinez plays the most appallingly grumpy detective I’ve seen in a long time, even when apologising for physically accosting Jolie, he seems half-heartedly sincere at best (‘First time I heet voman…sorry’). A shame, because the set-up is pretty enthralling. Scripted by Jon Bokenkamp, from a Michael Pye novel, it’s fairly watchable but it could’ve been better, so it’s a shame.



Rating: C+

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