Taking Lives (DVD)

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"Taking Lives" is not a bad crime thriller; it's just a tired one.

Angelina Jolie stars as a beautiful FBI agent helping to track down a serial killer. Remind you of anything? I mean, haven't Jodie Foster, Julianne Moore, Sigourney Weaver, Ashley Judd, and any number of other beautiful actresses played similar roles in similar serial-killer mysteries? Hollywood's fascination with sex and violence never ends.

This one has the distinction of being well acted and well paced, with a couple of surprises and a few grisly scenes, but it still feels like something we've all seen before.

The movie gets its title from a murderer who steals his victims' identities, first making sure they have no relatives or friends and then living out their lives, complete with their driver's licenses and social security cards, often in their own homes or apartments. The murderer takes their lives, so to speak, and he's been doing it for some twenty years. We're told he's "like a hermit crab. He outgrows one shell and he starts looking for a new one." Since the film begins with a flashback to what is apparently the killer's first murder as a late teenage boy two decades earlier, we have to assume the killer would today be a man in his late thirties. That's probably already too much information for the viewer to know if the mystery is to be effective.

The story is set in Montreal, Canada, undoubtedly for economic reasons since that's where every other movie these days seems to be shot, and there is little explanation why Illeana Scott (Jolie), an FBI profiler of serial killers, would be brought in from Washington, DC, to work on a case out of the country. But the FBI has been tracking this guy for years, so there she is, helping out an old friend named Leclair (Tcheky Karyo), the police superintendent who heads up the case.

Scott is very good at what she does, and later in the story she explains why she is so very dedicated to so macabre a profession. She literally throws herself into her work, hardly sleeping while on a case. She calls it compulsion, although Ms. Jolie never seems to convey any real feeling of the character's compulsive behavior. In fact, she appears rather placid and reserved through most of the film, perhaps part of the character's intentional facade. Like all cops in all movies, however, she is fond of breaking rules, so expect throughout the film for the character to act in unexpected, or at least unusual, ways.

Along the course of the investigation, Scott encounters the typical characters and events required in this kind of thriller. She meets an art dealer, for instance, James Costa (Ethan Hawke), who has witnessed one of the brutal murders being probed and who has caught a glimpse of the murderer. Being that Scott is a gorgeous woman and Costa is a handsome guy, their attraction for one another should come as no surprise.

Kiefer Sutherland appears as a suspect in the proceedings, a mysterious fellow named Hart, played in Sutherland's most menacing style. And Gena Rowlands appears as Mrs. Asher, the mother of a man who is being sought as the killer. She hasn't seen her son since he disappeared from her house twenty years before and she has always presumed him dead; that is until she reports to the police that she just saw him recently and that he fits the description of the person they're looking for. More ominously, she explains that she knows how dangerous her son is.

Oddly, the mother shows Scott and the other policemen pictures of her son when he was very young but none of the boy taken as a late teen, just before he left home. Did she have no such later pictures, even though she has a mantle full of early snapshots of the boy? And why do the police never bother to ask her for a later picture if they think her son may be involved in the murders? Were the filmmakers worried at this point that a photo of the teen would have given away too much of the story and decided instead to make the mother and the police look negligent? I mean, the audience has already seen the boy as a teen in the movie's prologue, and it doesn't reveal much about his identity; so what's the point? Moreover, the killer, supposedly so shrewd and so clever, has been living and murdering successfully all over America but suddenly returns to live and murder in his own home town, knowing he might run into his mother or others who could recognize him? How smart is that? Smart enough to carry the plot forward, I suppose.