Taxi (DVD)

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---

There is no semblance of sense to this American remake. It follows the three-second-edit rule. No shot lasts longer than three seconds because it has no trust in its audience's attention span. Boom, boom, cut; boom, boom, cut. Bullets fly, things blow up, cars crash. People keep taking Washburn's badge away from him. And he's such a klutz, he can't sleep at night without falling out of bed. "Taxi" is one heck of a taxing ride.

Video:
The movie follows a well-established tradition in DVD transfers, which demands that the worse the film is, the better it should look. "Taxi" is, therefore, transferred to disc in a very wide scope, measuring a ratio approximately 2.13:1 across my standard-screen Sony HD television; it is anamorphic, enhanced for 16x9 TVs; and it utilizes an exceptionally high bit rate. This careful attention to detail results in deep, solid colors, excellent object delineation, and virtually no grain. If anything, though, the colors are too bright to look natural, probably an intentional gimmick to give the film the appearance of a cartoon. It succeeds. The film looks like an unfunny cartoon.

Audio:
The audio is reproduced via Dolby Digital 5.1 processing and does exactly what it's called upon to do. Its strongest point is an ultrawide front stereo spread, some of the sounds extending well beyond the boundaries of the left and right speakers. There is not much deep bass, but mid bass is plenty blaring, as is most of the soundtrack. The rear channels, however, are supplied with surprisingly little information--a few squealing tires here and there and the faintest musical ambiance reinforcement. It seems another wasted opportunity.

Extras:
The movie comes, as I mentioned earlier, in two versions on the same disc: the regular theatrical version with a length of 97 minutes and a new, extended version at 104 minutes. Moreover, one of the disc's major extras is an audio commentary by director Tim Story, which, unfortunately, is only available on the theatrical version. Since I watched the extended version, it meant that in order to hear any part of the commentary, I had to go back and watch parts of the film over again (rather than listening intermittently during my first viewing). Understandably, I was not too keen on listening to the entire commentary. In what I did listen to, however, Story tells us we shouldn't take the film too seriously; a master of understatement. Later, he admits he had never seen the movie in finished form with a normal audience, so he's "not exactly sure if it worked or not." Should we tell him?

In addition to the commentary, there are four deleted scenes, which are very quick bits and at least as funny as anything in the film, which isn't saying much. So why weren't they included in the extended version? Maybe because then there wouldn't be anything left over to include in the DVD extras? Then, there's a twenty-minute featurette, "The Meter's Running: The Making of Taxi," which is mostly promotional; a five-minute promotional featurette, "Lights, Camera, Blue Screen," that shows us some of the film's CGI work; another five-minute promotional featurette, "Tour Guide Jimmy Fallon," in which the comic takes us through the studio and jokes around; and a two-minute promotional featurette, "Beautiful Criminals," that reprises some scenes of the lovely bank robbers. After those little promos is a twenty-minute promotional feature from Comedy Central, "Reel Comedy: Taxi"; followed by an "Inside Look" promo at the movie "Rebound." Finally, there are promotional trailers for "The Sandlot 2" and "American Dad"; twenty-four scene selections for the theatrical version of the movie and forty scene selections for the extended version, with scenes containing added material marked with asterisks; English, French, and Spanish spoken languages; and English and Spanish subtitles.

Not only are the extras extended and the video excellent, the packaging is deluxe as well. The keep case contains a paper insert listing chapters and bonus items, and case comes housed in a colorful, shiny, embossed slip cover.

Parting Shots:
Watching "Taxi" for 104 minutes was painful. Watching it for 97 minutes might have lessened the pain, but I doubt it. Among all the extras on the disc, I could find no trailer for "Taxi," but I imagine that if I had, it would have been just about as much as I would have liked seeing of this film. Loud noise and sheer idiocy do not equate with humor in any of my frames of reference.