The ending is particularly unsatisfactory, depending as it does on contrived irony that avoids all of the emotional issues on the table. If I have come this far with these two drips, and sailed with them, and been shipwrecked with them, and listened to their tiresome conversations, I demand that they arrive at some conclusion more rewarding than a misunderstanding based upon a misdelivered letter. This story was about something when Lina Wertmuller directed it, but now it’s not about anything at all. It’s lost the politics and the social observation and become just another situation romance about a couple of saps stuck in an inarticulate screenplay.
T
Taxi
(DIRECTED BY TIM STORY; STARRING QUEEN LATIFAH, JIMMY FALLON; 2004)
The taming of Queen Latifah continues in the dismal Taxi, as Queen, a force of nature in the right roles, is condemned to occupy a lamebrained action comedy. In a film that is wall-to-wall with idiocy, the most tiresome delusion is that car chases are funny. Movie audiences are bored to the point of sullen exhaustion by car chases, especially those without motivation, and most especially those obviously created with a computer.
As the movie opens, Latifah plays a bicycle messenger who races through Macy’s, rattles down the steps of the subway, zips through a train to the opposite platform, goes up a ramp, bounces off the back of a moving truck, lands on the sidewalk, jumps off a bridge onto the top of another truck, and so on. This is, of course, not possible to do, and the sequence ends with that ancient cliché in which the rider whips off a helmet and—why, it’s Queen Latifah!
It’s her last day on the job. She has finally qualified for her taxi license, and before long we see the customized Yellow Cab she’s been working on for three years. In addition to the titanium supercharger given by her fellow bike messengers as a farewell present (uh, huh), the car has more gimmicks than a James Bond special; a custom job like this couldn’t be touched at under $500,000, which of course all bike messengers keep under the bed. Her dream, she says, is to be a NASCAR driver. In her Yellow Cab?
Then we meet a cop named Washburn (Jimmy Fallon), who is spectacularly incompetent, blows drug busts, causes traffic accidents, and has not his badge but his driver’s license confiscated by his chief, Lt. Marta Robbins (Jennifer Esposito), who used to be his squeeze, but no more. When he hears about a bank robbery, he commandeers Queen Latifah’s cab, and soon she is racing at speeds well over 100 mph down Manhattan streets in pursuit of the robbers, who are, I kid you not, four supermodels who speak Portuguese. Luckily, Queen Latifah speaks Portuguese, too, because, I dunno, she used to be the delivery girl for a Portuguese take-out joint.
Oh, this is a bad movie. Why, oh why, was the lovely Ann-Margret taken out of retirement to play Fallon’s mother, an alcoholic with a blender full of margaritas? Who among the writers (Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon, and Jim Kouf) thought it would be funny to give Latifah and the cop laughing gas, so they could talk funny? What’s with Latifah’s fiancé, Jesse (Henry Simmons), who looks like a GQ cover boy and spends long hours in fancy restaurants waiting for Queen Latifah, who is late because she is chasing robbers, etc? Is there supposed to be subtle chemistry between Latifah and the cop? It’s so subtle, we can’t tell. (He’s afraid to drive because he had a trauma during a driving lesson, so she coaches him to sing while he’s driving, and he turns into a stunt driver and a pretty fair singer. Uh, huh.)
All these questions pale before the endless, tedious chase scenes, in which cars do things that cars cannot do, so that we lose all interest. If we were cartoons, our eyes would turn into X-marks. What is the point of showing a car doing 150 miles an hour through midtown Manhattan? Why is it funny that the cop causes a massive pile-up, with the cars in back leapfrogging onto the top of the pile? The stunt must have cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars; half a dozen indie films could have been made for that money. One of them could have starred Queen Latifah.
Latifah has been in movies since 1991 but first flowered in F. Gary Gray’s Set It Off (1996), about four black working women who rob a bank. She was wonderful in Living Out Loud (1998), as a torch singer who has an unexpectedly touching conversation with a lovelorn elevator operator (Danny DeVito). She walked away with her scenes in Chicago.
Why was it thought, by Latifah or anyone, that she needed to make a movie as obviously without ambition, imagination, or purpose as Taxi? Doesn’t she know that at this point in her career she should be looking for some lean and hungry Sundance type to put her in a zero-budget masterpiece that could win her the Oscar? True, it could turn out to be a flop. But better to flop while trying to do something good than flop in something that could not be good, was never going to be good, and only gets worse as it plows along.
Team America: World Police
(DIRECTED BY TREY PARKER; STARRING TREY PARKER, MATT STONE; 2004)
What’re you rebelling against, Johnny?
Whaddya got?
— MARLON BRANDO IN THE WILD ONE
If this dialogue is not inscribed over the doors of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, it should be. Their Team America: World Police is an equal opportunity offender, and waves of unease will flow over first one segment of their audience, and then another. Like a cocky teenager who’s had a couple of drinks before the party, they don’t have a plan for who they want to offend, only an intention to be as offensive as possible.
Their strategy extends even to their decision to use puppets for all of their characters, a choice that will not be universally applauded. Their characters, one-third life-size, are clearly artificial, and yet there’s something going on around the mouths and lips that looks halfway real, as if they were inhabited by the big faces with moving mouths from Conan O’Brien. There are times when the characters risk falling into the Uncanny Valley, that rift used by robot designers to describe robots that alarm us by looking too humanoid.
The plot seems like a collision at the screenplay factory between several half-baked world-in-crisis movies. Team America, a group not unlike the Thunderbirds, bases its rockets, jets, and helicopters inside Mount Rushmore, which is hollow, and race off to battle terrorism wherever it is suspected. In the opening sequence, they swoop down on Paris and fire on caricatures of Middle East desperadoes, missing most of them but managing to destroy the Eiffel Tower, the Arch of Triumph, and the Louvre.
Regrouping, the team’s leader, Spottswoode (voice by Daran Norris), recruits a Broadway actor named Gary to go undercover for them. When first seen, Gary (voice by Parker) is starring in the musical Lease, and singing “Everyone has AIDS.” Ho, ho. Spottswoode tells Gary: “You’re an actor with a double major in theater and world languages! Hell, you’re the perfect weapon!” There’s a big laugh when Gary is told that, if captured, he may want to kill himself, and is supplied with a suicide device I will not reveal.