TAKING LIVES

Rating: 1

When I do my annual interview with the Head Berry of the Golden Raspberry Awards Foundation, the name Angelina Jolie almost always pops up, as in, if she’s in a movie in any given year, she’s going to be nominated for a Razzie. Gone are the glory days of that >other< award that she won. She has settled into a career slump of epic proportions and one that she continues to force the viewing audience to watch. No better example of that is to be found than her latest effort, TAKING LIVES, a plodding, pretentious, and ultimately preposterous riff on the thriller genre.
She’s special agent Iliana Scott, a crack profiler brought into a grisly murder case in Montreal by an old pal from Quantico. Of course, she’s minutely analyzing the crime scene after a bulldozer has had its way with it, but let that pass. This being a predictably conventional exercise in character development, the local cops (Olivier Martinez and Jean-Huges Anglade) don’t like having her muscle in on their case and the usual metaphorical friction ensues. Yet, with two such preternaturally good looking human beings as Jolie and Martinez, is it just a matter of time before that friction becomes less metaphorical and more biblical?  Maybe not. Scott seems to have taken a shine to the weedy James Costa (Ethan Hawke), the sole surviving witness who can identify what seems to be a serial killer, though neither of them generates enough heat to soften butter.
The serial killer in question kills in order to take over his victim’s identity, never staying with one persona too long, just long enough to use his credit cards, and move on. The prime suspect is a psychotic who was thought to have been killed as a teenager, a theory that goes down the drain when his frosty mother (Gena Rowlands) spots him on a ferry and reports the sighting to the local police. For some reason, and frankly there’s no point in pondering this, showing her the sketch made by Costa doesn’t lead much of anywhere. On the other hand Jolie and company get to splash every cliche in the book across the silver screen, from the chase scene through the street fair to making a sacrificial lamb of one of the supporting players. More laughs, not the good kind, are generated than chills, though a ham-handed effort of sorts is made with Phillip Glass’ irksomely insistent score telling us to be scarned now, and shots of corpses in various stages of decay popping up. The latter effect is undercut mightily by the Muppet-like quality of said corpses.
Also undercutting the effect are performances by actors striking poses more appropriate to a high-concept fashion shoot than to a spine-tingling story. Jolie, all lips and one expression, is wooden. Hawke brings his usual somnambulant befuddlement to the role, broken only when he actually tries to scale dramatic heights. This is when he is like nothing so much as a five-year-old trying to talk his way out of trouble after being discovered with his hand in the cookie jar. Martinez keeps his lips in a perpetual pout and his eyes in a vague squint, perhaps he was trying for troubled and sexy, but he succeeds only in looking like he has lost his glasses and, as a result, can’t quite focus. The only survivor of this shipwreck is Kiefer Sutherland, who has a wicked sensuality to his sinister silkiness.
A denouement that putatively should deliver a final twist so startling as to make up for the previous waste of an hour and three-quarters only serves to annoy, keeping us as it does from actually leaving the theater and begining the process of forgetting this unpleasant interlude altogether.
As so often happens at films like these, my thoughts turn towards the Razzies, hence the opening paragraph. It is during the excruciating ineptitude that I think ahead to that happy time, less than a year from now, that this film will get what it deserves with the full pomp and circumstance for which the Razzies are known. Unless, of course, a crop of even more fetid films crawls out from under a rock between now and then. For all our sakes, let’s make prayers to a divine providence for that not to happen. TAKING LIVES is plenty bad enough to tide us all over until next year. And maybe the year after.