\Taxi"" turns out to be a rather good action movie but a pretty poor comedy. With the odd-couple pairing of Jimmy Fallon and Queen Latifah as the stumbling white guy stuck with the sarcastic black woman, there might have been plenty of comic fodder to draw on. Instead, the chemistry between them amounts to little more than the exchange of insults in increasingly worse slang. What saves the movie from complete disaster are the chases across, over and around New York City.
Washburn (Fallon) is a cop who just had his driving license revoked and is knocked down to a street cop when he happens to be the nearest officer to a bank robbery. He commandeers the taxi of Belle (Latifah), a streetwise, torque-hungry cabbie and they go off at top speed. Just ahead of them is a pack of efficient, leggy models who rob banks and speak Portuaguese.
Led by Vanessa, (Gisele B??ndchen) the criminals carry the movie through its longest moments, stopping to change from business suits to bikinis in one scene and patting down another equally attractive woman (Jennifer Esposito) in another. Apparently director Tim Story hopes that putting as many six-feet-tall women in one shot will make up for glaring flaws. It would work if the models/robbers were given the slightest bit of motivation, or even dialogue, for that matter.
To make matters worse, Latifah, as the hell-on-wheels heroine and, by default, the least attractive woman in the movie, is overwhelmingly stuck with lines that are either ways of calling Fallon an idiot, mentioning routes or, more simply, just saying ""Damn!"" Fallon can't respond with anything more than cheep, boyish lines, the most painful of which is: ""You didn't see my nads, did ya?""
There are a few times when the chemistry works toward some comedy, but it is done, quite literally, by the numbers. Belle asks Washburn if he's making a 78-point turn in one scene and, in another, he tells her that his mom (a very miscast Ann-Margaret) has a 38-ounce blender for her drinks.
There are enough distractions to make the weak one-liners forgettable. The models can only do so much without some races through the boroughs. In ""Taxi,"" the two vehicles, Belle's cab and the robbers' BMW, are equipped with enough additions to hold together through their encounters. The movie uses chases that cut through Grand Central Station, a college campus and a few work zones to achieve some white-knuckle moments without making them laughably unbelievable.
As a taxi driver, I had to see what this movie was all about. Cabbies are beholden to a few guidelines and ""Taxi"" obeys its share but dismisses others. First, there is never a scene where the dispatcher speaks to Belle. Even in New York, a driver probably can't depend exclusively on flagged rides. Also, she's a middle-aged, energetic, optimistic driver. Those types are hard to come by in a business where most drivers are hardened, chain-smoking, coffee-slamming guys who would rather sit around at the airport than do anything that involves the police.
Where ""Taxi"" is correct is in its characterization of cabbies as the unlikely complement to cops. They both get stuck with more trouble than they deserve, drive Ford Crown Victorias and can time traffic lights to within a microsecond of their changes. However, the essential difference can be explained with a Madison example. While cops dread Johnson and State Street at bartime, cab drivers live and race for it.
In that manner, ""Taxi"" succeeds in capturing the constant craving a cabbie has for a bit of adventure as long as it doesn't mean losing some points off their license. The speed and impulsiveness are there but the humor isn't, making this cab ride memorable only for a few minutes before it gets back to the unworkable combination of a typical Latifah and a forgettable performance from Fallon.
