Taking Lives

Can someone please explain just what has happened to Angelina Jolie? Once hotly tipped for very big things, the pouty actress has, considering her recent output, made it her mission to sabotage her own career. Nowhere is that more evident than with the ridiculous serial killer by numbers genre flick, Taking Lives. Taking up this career destruction up a notch, Jolie plays Illeana Scott, a - wait for it! - maverick FBI agent and profiler whose methods are the very definition of unorthodox. Her latest case concerns a particularly nasty piece of work, who murders handsome young men, and after dismembering their bodies beyond all recognition, assumes their identities. Foolproof as this sounds, once the killer gets wind of Illeana's dogged pursuit, he can't resist the temptation of ringing his nemesis and offers her tantalising titbits of pop psychology. But I'm getting ahead of myself here: In what the filmmakers probably consider a neat role reversal, Ethan Hawke plays Costa, an art dealer who has witnessed one of the killings and may be able to offer some clue as to the bad man's identity. Of course, this means that Illeana's gotta keep an eye on him, which is convenient when it comes to the mandatory sex scene in the movie.

Although competently shot and produced, Taking Lives makes no attempt to advance the well worn serial killer genre in any discernable fashion, Riffing off any number of tired sources, the film fails to channel its second-hand influences into anything which could be confused with vaguely interesting. The plot moves with predictable clumsiness, attempting to use Jolie as both a sex object (exhibit A: an outrageous moment of gratuitous nudity) and a strong female role model. She does her best with the viciously underwritten role, but there's nothing anyone can do to save Taking Lives from turning on itself by the time the ridiculous finale wheels around.