An incredibly dark thriller with an exceptional central performance

Rating: 10/10 (9 November 2016)

Quite rightly regarded as one of the best films of all time, TAXI DRIVER is without a doubt compelling viewing. What the film lacks in plot it makes up for in characterisation: De Niro is with us from the start, we follow on his journey as he slides into extreme violence and becomes a vigilante. Although it's obvious that this man is disturbed from the very beginning - a man who considers pornography to be "just another movie", who is always at breaking point. You can't really blame him though. After all, his empty life is forever surrounded by people who don't deserve to live, who don't deserve to populate this planet, and nobody is doing anything about it. It's up to Bickle to do the dirty work himself. He is the new rain coming down on the streets to clear away all the garbage.
Just about everyone involved here is extremely lucky in not putting a foot wrong. Martin Scorsese basks in his finest hour, even later classics like GOODFELLAS just can't hold a candle to match the intensity and complexity of this film. Check out the clever cameo where he plays a passenger spying on his cheating wife. The film focuses on De Niro's character, meaning that a lot of other roles are underwritten; Cybill Shepherd appears only fleetingly as a kind of idealistic fantasy figure. Jodie Foster excels as a child prostitute, hard and yet fragile at the same time, and Harvey Keitel is suitably slimy as a no-good pimp. In small roles are Peter Boyle and Joe Spinell. However it's De Niro who commands the screen, this is his film, we see things through his eyes. I don't think his quiet, brooding darkness here has ever been matched.
There are countless moments to enjoy. Bickle talking to a 'secret service' man, a deliciously pleasant conversation full of deceit and lies; the infamous ad-libbed sequence in front of the mirror, where "You talking' to me?" became a classic movie quote; the almost tragic conversations with Iris. The ending itself is a shock, a total bloodbath made all the more horrific because the violence has been relatively tame up to then. Only three people are killed, but each shot and stabbed a number of times; fingers a blown off, necks spray blood, faces riddled with holes, heads splattering over walls. And then the ironic ending, where Bickle is revered as a hero instead of a cold-blooded killer; a more telling portrait of today's society there couldn't be. For a study of the reasons a person is driven to extreme violence, you couldn't do much better than this.