Final scene changes everything - and not for the better

Rating: 6/10 (2 February 2019)

Taxi Driver is Scorcese's early period, which is notable for bleak movies full of unlikeable losers. As opposed to his big-budget phase in which his movies are bombastic, overblown, and full of loud a##h#les.
DeNiro brings the psycho intensity. Jodie Foster is quite amazing for her age. And Cybil Shepherd - vavoom! - was there a more beautiful actress working in the 70s.
The repetitive score got on my nerves. And the entire movie could easily have been brought in at 90 minutes.
However, that's not my biggest beef. Scorcese presents us with Travis Bickle, a disaffected, scrambled-egg vet who drives cabs to chase away insomnia, stalks a beautiful girl, gets rejected, and loads up on guns & ammo just in case he needs it to clean the scum off the streets. Fine, I'll play along. But when he fails at his primary target he goes on a tawdry shooting spree and ends up with a hole in his neck.
The final scene should be the crane shot of Bickle unconscious on the couch as the camera pans out of the room and on to the street. Bickle dead. The end. The typical Hollywood gun-p#rn story where the violence-fetishizing ex-military psycho dies at the end, just another American loser unredeemed in death.
But no. There's more. We get a final, highly improbably scene where he's obviously admired by his fellow cabbies, fully healed physically and psychologically, even though in real life nobody with any sense would get within 15 feet of the guy because he'd be a scrambled-brain triple-murderer. And then, to add insult to injury, who hails a ride but the beautiful blonde who rejected him earlier. She makes moonfaces at him like he's a rock star, and ultimately he drives away, leaving her alone on the curb.
What are we to make of this? Are we to admire Bickle - gun-loving, violent, psycho loser - for he is now big man on campus? That he can save the h##ker, murder with impunity, and get the beautiful clean upper-class blonde girl if he chose? The whole thing is so obnoxious.
The only mystery to me is that the psycho loser who tried to shoot Reagan became obsessed with Foster and not Shepherd. That would have been more in keeping with the story.
Scorcese is surely the most over-rated hack in contemporary Hollywood. All his movies are slick and professionally made, but ultimately empty, with little redeeming value other than the glorification of vice, esp gun violence.