Taxi: Movie & DVD Review (2004)

(Originally published 2004)

In her rich, soulful new album of standards, “The Dana Owens Album,” the rap star and actress Queen Latifah takes a risk by once again pressing against expectations, deftly broadening her audience with smooth covers of such songs as “California Dreamin’,” “Hard Times,” “Hello Stranger” and “I Put a Spell On You.”

The album is a pleasure, exactly what Latifah fans have been waiting for since her Academy Award-nominated performance as the brassy Matron Mama Morton in the 2002 musical, “Chicago.”

What isn’t such a pleasure is this new movie of hers, “Taxi,” which continues to find Hollywood stumbling to find its footing in the face of her impressive talent.

Since her rousing performance in “Chicago,” Latifah has been saddled with an industry whose laziness and lack of imagination have demanded that she play to ethnic stereotype. “Barbershop,” “The Cookout,” “Barbershop 2: Back in Business” and “Bringing Down the House” all were crowdpleasers that commented on black and white culture, but not without crossing the line into minstrel in an effort to do so.

As directed by Tim Story from a script by Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon and Jim Kouf, “Taxi” is a tired retread of the 1998 French film of the same name, but it isn’t the breakout movie this Queen deserves.

It’s a dim slog with few laughs that features the actress as Belle Williams, a Manhattan bike messenger cum cabbie whose souped up wheels fly through the curiously uncongested streets of New York in ways that suggest you can drive through that city at 120 mph. As if.

When Belle teams with Jimmy Fallon’s Washburn, a washed-up cop with an aversion to cars who’s out to thwart a bevy of busty, bank-robbing Brazilian supermodels, we get a buddy movie crammed with chase scenes that finds Belle and Washburn trying to connect in spite of their initial dislike of each other.

I understand this is meant to be Fallon’s movie and this review hasn’t focused on him, but there’s a reason for that. Let’s call it what it is--dismissal. Fallon isn’t the interesting one here and he’s certainly not the performer we’ll be watching 10 years from now—Latifah is. Fallon is of the moment. Whatever jocular appeal he possessed on “Saturday Night Live” is lost in translation to the big screen.

As for Latifah, “The Dana Owens Album” confirms that at least the music industry knows it has something on its hands with her talent. Now it’s up to Hollywood to follow suit and figure out what the rest of us already know. Queen Latifah is ready for the A-list--and the better movies that go along with it.

Grade: D+