Product: Taxi (Full Screen Edition) (2004)
Rating: 1.0
inane, bottom-of-the-barrel comedy
*1/2Andy Washburn is a thoroughly inept police officer who's such a bad driver that his very own lieutenant takes his license away from him, leaving him without wheels to do his job in crime-ridden Manhattan. Belle Williams is a newly licensed cabbie, whose absurdly hopped-up taxi Washburn jumps into when he needs to get to the scene of a bank robbery. Together, they become an unlikely crime-fighting duo as they go after a quartet of gorgeous Brazilian criminals who look like they just stepped out of the pages of Vanity Fair or Vogue (quite possibly the least believable criminals in movie history). And if this synopsis doesn't sound like the setup for a cinematic disaster to you, you obviously have a much lower threshold for movie comedy than I do.Trapped in a vehicle that is practically a blueprint for how NOT to make an effective comedy, Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon have nothing to do for 97 minutes but exchange witless one liners in between highly preposterous and ultimately very boring car chases. Although the two lead actors try their best with what they've been given, they're eventually overcome not only by bad writing and by-the-numbers direction but by a bunch of supporting actors who give uniformly dreadful performances (including a sadly misused Ann Margaret).What COULD they all have been thinking of?