Taking Lives

There is zero aura around the killer, the film works part-time between the characters, there’s less suspense than one would feel looking for mushrooms in the desert, and the surprise denouement is self-parodic artifice of a B-movie video thriller. That’s not even to mention the film’s “finish”, which perhaps the filmmakers didn’t even seriously mean. The occasional rain and the indifferent faces of everyone in attendance create the feeling of a cold and evil world, but Philip Glass’s gently exotic music has no trace of mystery or darkness. It doesn’t suit the film at all. The actual tracking of the killer, which takes up two-thirds of the film, is devoid of any screenwriting ideas and has no growing sense of bleakness. Though it does contain two “flashlight” visits to dark places with decent scares, the power of those scares is directly proportional to their uselessness. You get frightened, but when you think about what happened, it just doesn’t work. In his previous drama, The Salton Sea, D.J. Caruso exhibited a feel for perfect form, which he doesn’t apply to Taking Lives. (25/04/2004)

I don't understand how Caruso managed to become a laid-back hitmaker like Disturbia based on this unsuccessful mess. Angie plays her role well, Hawke excels, and a great cameo in the middle of the film briefly stirs things up, but a thriller without suspense? An action movie with only one chase scene? A psychological crime story without a hint of atmosphere? I'm not interested. Especially since the killer's identity is so obvious that I almost didn't want to believe that I hadn't misjudged it. (17/05/2008)

This was a huge disappointment. After the first scene, one is excited because it could be something truly good, thrilling, but the tension quickly disappears because the viewer immediately realizes who they are actually looking for. Even the twist at the end, which was equally transparent, doesn't change that. Only the naked Angelina brought it up to those few percent. (11/01/2015)

In the end, it turned out exactly as I expected (and man how those glasses suited him at the end!). But that's fine with me, sometimes movies just turn out the way you think they will. The worst was the lame dialogue. Having the most perfect heroine (Jolie didn't show anything new, it was all old, hackneyed, and bad; all she showed were her tits...) didn't add to the beauty of it either, she was the one who pissed me off the most. All in all, I was thinking this was a movie for the garbage rating. I only gave it a single star for the few moments when I didn't roll my eyes and tell myself the heroine needed to die (after all, she wasn't in the scene most of the time...). (09/12/2010)

A relatively solidly directed film with a few solid twists and turns, an attractive Angelina Jolie, and nothing more we haven't seen elsewhere. (23/04/2004)