Review of Taxi

Introduction

Whenever you see a list of the top ten car chase movies, Bullitt, Ronin and The French Connection always feature. Another less well known film, Taxi, is also regularly included - and I had the opportunity to see why at the weekend.

The film follows Daniel, a speed freak taxi-driver who prides himself on getting from A to B very quickly indeed. Unfortunately, him 100mph plus antics through the streets don`t impress the Police, and he soon finds himself driving for them to keep his license.

Video

The video comes in 1.78:1 widescreen, which despite the lack of anamorphic enhancement, is pretty good, with reasonable detail and clarity and no grain or dirt. One major problem for owners of 16:9 sets however is that the English subtitles sits below the picture - so when you zoom the image to fill your screen, you lose the subtitles. Luckily I watched this on my projector rather than my TV so I didn`t have a problem.

The visuals concentrate on the driving, and there`s plenty of it - mostly at very high speed along very busy roads. The city of Marseilles provides an attractive backdrop for the chases, and there is excellent use of aerial photography to provide chase-cam sequences of cars weaving through traffic.

Audio

The audio is presented in French Dolby Digital 2.0, and whilst I would have obviously preferred multichannel sound, the stereo track is certainly adequate.

Aside from the dialogue, which is clear and understandable (although my French isn`t up to scratch any more!), there is plenty of lively music, lots of car related sound effects - tyres, engines, crashes etc and numerous other sound effects.

Features

The extras are exceptionally dull, consisting of filmographies and the trailer.

Conclusion

Taxi was a rather entertaining 86 minutes of comedy and lunatic driving, helped by an appealing cast, plenty of laughs and some excellent action sequences. The car chase sequences are certainly worthy of their continual acclaim, and are presented in a light hearted style that works very well.

Despite being non-anamorphic widescreen, the video is good, but the subtitle placement will cause serious annoyance to anyone with a 16:9 television who is not fluent in French. The disc is helped by competent sound, but the extras are disappointing.