A real work of art, in it's unique kind!

Rating: 10/10 (1 October 2000)

This is one of those amazing movies that people learn to like. It is an amazing portrait of New York in the mid-seventies.
I think that De Niro is a fabulous actor, and this is his second great movie, doing a fine job as Travis Bickle, the mentally disturbed taxi driver.
Martin Scorcese takes you in a trip to the universe of a vietnam veteran who was mentally ill because of that same war. In a time when that theme was so trendy, Scorcese manages to face that theme and escape from the cliché of the patriotic movie, where the americans are the good guys and the eastern (always treated as communists) people are the bad guys, the oppressing dictators. When watching this movie, you get the message of what the war does to one's mind, without looking at war pictures (after all, the action is in NYC, there the war is another) and see the inner battle of a struggling man urging to release all his destructive energy and killer instinct. You don't get many chances to see a movie where a guy starts killing people without any particular reason and manages to get away as a hero.
There are three actors to really look at in this movie, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Jodie Foster.
De Niro, as i said, has his second big movie and really shows us Travis as a disturbed man, you start to get into the action because he does such a fine job with his charachter.
Harvey Keitel is one of those actors that you just love to watch, because he is so charismatic. Whatever his character is, you'll like it.
And Jodie Foster had here her big leap for the stardom. She was only 14 and played a runaway girl that starts on hookery for the need of money, i think that's really complicated for a 14 year old girl...
It's not a main stream movie, and that's probably why it's so good, it wasn't made to entertain the mass public (for that you have the box-office recordists...). One of the most amazing things in this movie is that, after all the killings, he continues with his life, as if nothing happened. And, of course, it's one of those movies that have those little lines that stay in everyone's mind for generations...
9/10
(Are you talkin' to me?!)