Taxi (1998)

There's a moment in Taxi where a souped-up Peugeot 406 tears through the streets of Marseille at a speed that should be physically impossible, and rather than question it, you just lean forward in your seat with a stupid grin on your face. That's the whole film in miniature. It doesn't ask for your respect. It just wants you along for the ride.

Luc Besson wrote this thing, and it's got his fingerprints all over it. The high-concept silliness, the kinetic pace, the complete disregard for anything resembling plausibility. The setup is almost wilfully absurd: a Marseille cab driver with the reflexes of a racing driver teams up with an incompetent, barely-licensed police officer to chase down a gang of German bank robbers. That's it. That's the film. And it commits to that premise with a kind of gleeful, full-throttle conviction that's honestly quite hard to resist.

Samy Naceri and Frédéric Diefenthal make for an odd couple that works more often than it probably should. Naceri's driver is cool, quick, and built for speed. Diefenthal's cop is a walking disaster, perpetually flustered, forever getting in the way. The chemistry between them is broad and silly, but there's warmth underneath it, and that warmth is what keeps the film from tipping into pure noise. Just about.

The car chases are, without question, the reason this film exists and the reason you should watch it. They're insane. Physics-defying, shot with real flair and energy, through narrow alleyways and oncoming traffic and tunnels and everything else Marseille can throw at a moving vehicle. There's a tactile, slightly reckless quality to the action that reminds you this was made before CGI became the default answer to everything. These cars are really moving. You can feel it. It's the kind of propulsive, seat-of-your-pants filmmaking that puts me in mind of Hardcore Henry, though Taxi is far more interested in laughs than pure visceral assault.

That said, I won't pretend it's without fault, because it absolutely is. The humour goes broad and then goes broader, and occasionally tips over into genuinely cringe-worthy territory. The dialogue is clunky in the way only a film running on pure audacity can get away with. The characters have depth roughly equivalent to a puddle. And there's a recurring silliness to the police station scenes that suggests the film occasionally forgets it's supposed to be exciting and settles instead for being a bit daft. It's not good in the traditional sense. I want to be clear about that.

But here's the thing: it knows exactly what it is. Taxi is not trying to be anything other than a loud, fast, utterly French blast of B-movie energy, and on those terms it absolutely delivers. Think The Italian Job remixed with Cannonball Run and a cigarette hanging out of its mouth. It's Gauloises smoke and squealing tyres and a plot that exists purely as scaffolding to hang car chases on, and if you can make peace with that going in, you'll have a genuinely good time.

Three stars.

Not a classic. Not particularly sophisticated. But a cult gem for anyone who loves cars going way too fast in all the wrong places. Taxi doesn't need to make sense. It just needs to go. And boy, does it go.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1998  | Watched: 2025-10-18

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