Noir with a psychological twist

Rating: 9/10 (28 September 2008)

This film is not particularly rich as for the content. A professional killer has been hired to eliminate all the witnesses and even the cops and other prosecution personnel in some criminal case. Banal. He does not want to drive his own car and he does not want to hire a car and an accomplice to drive him around. So he comes at night and just hires a taxi and its driver. That makes him difficult to trace. But that creates some problems because the taxi-driver is not really willing to do the job. And then the two are like mutual prisoners or custodians. One cannot work without the other and one cannot escape from the other. Yet the taxi-driver, after a long series of killings, finds the courage to cause an accident which means the arrival of the cops, but that also means the discovery of the first body that had been put in the trunk and the taxi driver's discovery that the next and last target is the woman he had transported just before this embarrassing and invading client. He decides to escape from the cop who is trying to arrest him, and who was alone on his car patrol, and to prevent the killing of the girl. He will even go slightly further. But that's not the main interest of the film. We could have predicted all that from the very start. Then it's only details. The interest is the rhythm and the twists in the fabric of the tale. In fact it is economical in blood and even bullets because it centers on the psychological profile of the taxi-driver and the relation he establishes with his customer. Strangely enough it is more psychological than we could have expected and that saves the film from banality.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines