(Director’s Cut)
**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Angelina Jolie, Ethan Hawke, Keifer Sutherland, Olivier Martinez, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Tcheky Karyo, and Gena Rowlands
Directed by D.J. Caruso & written for the screen by Jon Bokenkamp, from the novel by Michael Pye
2004
Director’s cut: 109 min NR (should be R)
Theatrical release: 103 min R
The serial killer is a godsend for mystery writers. His schemes and motives can be as byzantine and bizarre as the writer wants and the reader can tolerate because, well, he’s crazy. On the surface, serial killer novels are popular for the same reason as Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes: their appeal is not character development or emotional involvement, but the pleasure of trying to solve a watertight puzzle that plays fair but keeps us guessing. A great mystery will also have character development and emotional involvement, but we’re just talking about the good ones.
I don’t know what it says about our culture that the heir apparent of Christie and Conan Doyle are novels about maniacs. It’s certainly not realism; real maniacs are seldom as inventive and crafty as their fictional counterparts. If memory serves, Jeffrey Dalmer was undone when he let two patrolmen into his apartment and one of them found severed heads in the fridge. Doyle’s stories about Sherlock Holmes are all about the English middle class’s simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from the exotic and transgressive, represented by foreigners and the underclass. Christie delights in weaving together the reprehensible with the banal: crimes are committed in commonplace villages by men and women indistinguishable from the rest of us for the mundane motives of inheritance and marriage.
Off the top of my head, the serial killer novel seems to be a reaction against Christie, perhaps moving back toward Doyle’s approach, in which the criminal is distinctly The Other. Because he is always insane and brilliant, we are let off the hook and not asked to relate to him very much, besides the occasional bone thrown to the idea that “he just wants to be loved.” This is a contrast to the world of Christie, in which anyone, no matter how normal or mediocre, is just a few steps morally and physically from getting the rat poison from the cupboard and doing away with great aunt Gladys. As we become a richer and richer people, and as technology continually affords us with more and more opportunities to avoid having actual physical contact with other human beings, our culture is replacing with dull fear the ability to communicate with strangers. Serial killer stories play off this fear by making everyone we haven’t met potentially insane, so it’s best just to stay inside and not go out. (In one of its more diabolical touches, “Taking Lives” twists this fear by making all the victims friendless homebodies, so you’re screwed either way.)
Anyway, on to “Taking Lives,” which will satisfy in a pinch, if you’re in the mood for it. It’s composed entirely of existing serial killer elements that have been put in a slightly different order, and I don’t mean that in a bad way necessarily. Think of it as “Variations on a Theme of Hannibal Lecter.” We get the string of unsolved murders, we get the cheap psychology, we get the Cop On The Edge (also known as the COTE) whom the other detectives don’t quite trust, and there’s spooky chicanery involving twins. Because it’s based on a glossy paperback you’d buy in an airport, it’s a glossy film, of police snooping around with flashlights in one hand and guns in the other, and when there’s sex, it’s late-night-on-HBO sex. The gore also seems awkward and unnecessary; to do what needs to be done, the killer could just as easily stab his victims, but he cuts off their hands and gouges out their eyeballs because that sounds neat in a preview.
The gimmick in “Taking Lives” is that our killer has been assuming the identities of his victims for weeks, months, and even years after each murder. Because his victims are all loners whom he has stalked for a long time, no one notices what’s happened until he’s left for his next victim. This time, however, there’s a witness: an art dealer (Ethan Hawke) saw the killer doing his business. But up go the red flags: is the art dealer going to be the next victim, or is he really the killer playing a ruse?
The COTE is an emotionally distant girl detective (Angelina Jolie), which has been the favorite archetype for killer thrillers since Clarice Starling because it combines the vulnerable woman in danger with the hardened cop. She’s an FBI agent, brought to a pleasantly-photographed Montreal to help with the investigation. The Canadian police are played by reliable European actors Tcheky Karyo (“The Good Thief”) as the captain, Jean-Hugues Anglade (“Killing Zoe”) as the nice cop, and Olivier Martinez (“Unfaithful”) as the tough cop. Snooping around and waiting in doorways is a mystery man (Keifer Sutherland), dangerous and powerful, and an aging woman (Gena Rowlands) who thinks she saw her long dead son on the street is also in the mix. Ethan Hawke gives the most interesting performance as suspect, witness, and potential victim, an uneasy combination that works well with his natural uncertainty and nervous smiles.
Despite a shortage of suspects and a couple obvious red herrings, “Taking Lives” is fine for a Friday night trip to the video store. I guess my only complaint is, if we’re here to see the clockwork unfolding of a puzzle, shouldn’t the clock work a little better? The mystery movies in which the crook’s scheme actually makes complete sense are few and far between; in most cases you can usually uncover some flaw or another made by the filmmakers within a few days of watching. But with “Taking Lives” I had the sneaking suspicion early on that things would not be airtight. The killer launches on a scheme that’s much more trouble than it’s worth. If he’s killed a dozen-or-so people before the film even begins, why does killing one more person involve so many risks and scheming? Why would a killer who has eluded police capture for years, and even eight months after his photograph is plastered across the continent, be so concerned about escaping one petty thug in the first place? If the police have two witnesses and one of them is also a suspect, wouldn’t it occur to at least one cop to put the suspected witness in a line-up to be viewed by the other? But, like I said before, logic problems like this don’t matter in serial killer movies because, well, he’s crazy.
Finished November 29th, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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