Taking Lives

        If you can judge a thriller by the number of times it makes you jump out of your seat, Taking Lives succeeds enormously.
My companion and I jumped at least four different times in response to the action on the screen. At points in the movie, the viewer’s nerves are so on edge that even the ringing of a cell phone makes us start.
        It stacks up well by other measures, too. Its dramatic twists and turns will leave your head spinning. While I correctly figured out who the killer was before the movie revealed it, I was still unprepared for half a dozen further revelations in the last third of the film.
        And if your taste in thrillers is for the gruesome (though if it were, wouldn’t you be at Dawn of the Dead, which also opened this weekend?), this movie will satisfy that desire too.
        The tone is set by the opening sequence. After showing the first, apparently spur-of-the-moment murder, a montage of grisly images of dead bodies, newspaper reports of unsolved murders, and death records accompanies the title credits, bringing us to the present-day excavation of a body during a Montreal construction project.
        That discovery triggers an investigation into the ultimate in identity thieves – a serial killer who takes over the lives of his victims, all loners who won’t be missed much, all roughly his own age and size. Of course, if you want to take the victim’s identity, you have to obliterate all identifying features – hence the recurrent, grisly images of mutilated faces and handless arms (no fingerprints).
        Leading the investigation is Ileana Scott (Angelina Jolie), an FBI profiler on loan to the Montreal police. Like other fictional profilers, if not their real-life counterparts, she seems vaguely psychic. Her approach is at times pretty creepy – we first see her lying deathlike in the empty grave from which the latest victim has been removed. Later, she tries to understand the killer by lying in his abandoned bed. Is this really how criminals are discovered, or is it a mark of the investigator’s own bizarre psyche? We don’t know, and the movie really doesn’t tell us.
        Lots of close-ups of Jolie’s eyes and quick flashes to what she sees – provides visual symbolism if not entirely logical support for another aspect of her forensic expertise. Scott is preternaturally observant, picking up in a glance important details that experienced crime-scene investigators have evidently overlooked in hours of meticulous investigation.
        For two-thirds of the movie, Jolie appears impassive. She has two main expressions – a smile and a “serious” look which she adopts to show she is serious about her business. She is visually detached even as we are supposed to believe she is heavily engaged in the investigation – so, unlike such dramatic predecessors as Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs, we never comprehend her own psychological investment in the events.
        At one point, Ileana asks to be taken off the case, telling the chief inspector, “I might be having a reaction to the witness.” But this far into the movie, there is little real chemistry between her and the witness (Ethan Hawke). Nothing in Jolie’s performance suggests the passion that is unleashed later in a torrid love scene, which therefore seems gratuitous.
        Maybe that’s not important – the attraction of this kind of film lies more in the suspense of the plot than the inner workings of the main character. Still, it can be somewhat annoying.
        And what are we to make of the movie’s careful elaboration of the killer’s typical strategy, only to have him shift to a different m.o. for the plot’s key murders?
        For his part, Hawke does an excellent job as Costa, an apparently accidental witness who becomes heavily implicated in an attempt to catch the killer. His interest in Ileana is apparent, as is his evident fear for his own safety. In a complex role with many more levels than is first apparent, Hawke exhibits much more emotional range than his costar.
        Quibbles about characterization and consistency aside, this remains an entertaining film. It delivers the requisite thrills and is filmed in a kind of neo-noire style, with lots of dark scenes and atmospheric locales.
        Still, I came away with a sense of disappointment. With an intriguing villain at its heart, Taking Lives had the potential to be a classic of its genre; as it is, it is no more or less memorable than half a dozen others – like Twisted, the Ashley Judd suspense film that only recently left Aberdeen.