Taxi (20th Century-Fox, EuropaCorp, Robert Simonds Productions, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, February 25) my husband Charles got tired of watching MS-NBC after Rachel Maddow’s and Lawrence O’Donnell’s shows and asked me to put on a movie. I rummaged through the DVD backlog and found a bootleg copy of the 2004 film Taxi I’d picked up from the free pile at the North Park Library. It’s a remake of a French film from 1998 (which did well enough at the box office it merited three sequelae) written by Luc Besson and directed by Gérard Pirès, described on imbd.com as follows: “To work off his tarnished driving record, a hip taxi driver must chauffeur a loser police inspector on the trail of German bank robbers.” For the U.S. version, directed by Tim Story from a script by Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon, and Jim Kouf, the taxi driver was changed into a woman, Isabelle “Belle” Williams (Queen Latifah), and the hapless policeman was called Andrew “Andy” Washburn and was played by current Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon – who’s quite nice in a doofus-y Chevy Chase-esque way. In the opening scene we see Belle leaving her job as a bike messenger and taking proud possession of the so-called “medallion,” the permit you need to drive a taxicab in New York City. (At one point taxicab medallions were so scarce the price for one had reached $1.2 million; the advent of ride-shares dropped the price to just $250,000.) Belle is the widow of a NASCAR driver and before he died he showed her how to soup up an ordinary Ford Crown Victoria into a super-vehicle equipped for speeding. Her cab includes a secret panel activating a supercharger and also concealing its usual license plate and substituting a New Jersey one for her usual New York one. In the opening scene she gets a middle-aged male passenger who offers her $100 over the regulation fare if she can get him to Kennedy Airport in 15 minutes.

She opens the secret controls, activates the supercharger, and drives a hell-bent-for-leather car chase through New York City’s predictably crowded streets until she gets the guy there with 5 ½ minutes to spare – whereupon he’s so unnerved by the whole experience he immediately finds a spare trash can and retches into it. Andy needs a driver because he’s wiped out his previous car; he unknowingly put it in reverse instead of forward gear and backed into a bodega. So he hails Belle and the two set off in the direction of a bank in the process of being robbed by a quartet of hold-up artists who turn out to be four Brazilian women in male drag: Vanessa (Gisele Bündchen), “Redhead” (Ana Cristina de Oliviera), and two identified merely as “Third Robber” (Ingrid Vandebosch) and “Fourth Robber” (Magdali Amadei). Both Belle and Andy are having relationship problems: Belle is dating a hot, sexy Black stud named Jesse (Henry Simmons) but he’s understandably possessive when she misses a dinner date at which he’d planned to propose and offer her an engagement ring to continue to chase the bank robbers with Andy. As for Andy, he’s having a sexual affair with his commanding officer, Lt. Marta Robbins (Jennifer Esposito), but she’s so determined not to let their personal relationship get in the way of their professional one that midway through the movie she suspends him and threatens to fire him. Belle and Andy show up at Jesse’s apartment – coincidentally Andy lives in the same building with his mother (the formidable Ann-Margret) – and Andy tries to explain what he’s been doing with Jesse’s girlfriend but Jesse doesn’t take it well and uses a blowtorch to melt down Andy’s police badge until it’s a hunk of amorphous black metal.

Mostly, though, Taxi is just an endless series of car chases – one wonders how many stunt drivers the producers had to hire and whether they got hazard pay – which Charles called a cross between The French Connection, To Live and Die in L.A., and The Blues Brothers. (There are drug dealers in this movie, but not much is made of them. There’s just a scene in which a drug deal goes bad and various people on either side of it kill each other.) Vanessa and her henchwomen take a young, scared guy hostage at one of their robberies, though Lt. Robbins offers to trade places with him and so she ends up in the car during the last chase scene and there’s a quite good stunt scene in which she (or her stunt double) tries to cross from the robbers’ car to Belle’s. There’s also a good scene in which Andy drops his gun in the back seat of Belle’s cab and accidentally shoots out her window as he retrieves it, and a clever shot of Vanessa ripping off the red coat covering her BMW to reveal a blue exterior underneath so the cops won’t know what color car to look for. Ultimately Taxi is a fun film even though it makes almost no sense; and romantically it ends the way you’d expect it to, with Belle and Jesse reunited and altar-bound and Andy apparently back on track with Lt. Robbins both personally and professionally even though I was hoping for a romantic attraction between Queen Latifah’s and Jimmy Fallon’s characters. Charles and I were watching it from a bootleg DVD that cut off about 20 minutes from the original 97-minute running time (though it’s likely that about 10 minutes were just the closing credits, which cut off abruptly), which at least gave us enough time to squeeze in another movie on last night’s cinematic diet. It’s also indicative of how sloppily Taxi is structured and how little of it is important plot-wise that we could watch an abbreviated version and not feel like we were missing anything of consequence – though the sound was pretty hissy (not that that matters much in an action-driven movie like this!). Also, the image was letterboxed on all sides and I missed our old TV that could have corrected for that.