Taking Lives (2004)

There is a particular kind of 2004 thriller that arrives with a stylish coat and nothing underneath it, and Taking Lives is a reliable specimen. D. J. Caruso directs Angelina Jolie as Illeana Scott, an FBI profiler dispatched to Montreal to help local police catch a killer who wears his victims' identities like borrowed suits. The film is adapted from Michael Pye's novel, and it carries the faint mustiness of a paperback that has been passed around an airport. Jolie does the work. The city does the rest.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is thin. A woman leads a male-dominated police unit, which counts for something, though the screenplay promptly hands her a romance with her prime suspect and then a finale in which a prosthetic pregnant belly is revealed as a sting prop. Her body becomes the twist. That is not empowerment. It is a screenwriting device with a pulse. The Montreal setting supplies a few French-Canadian faces in the supporting ranks, and the cast is otherwise the standard white Hollywood arrangement. No other identity, grievance, or cause is raised, examined, or even gestured toward.

The film has no interest in instructing anyone. There is no environmental sermon, no class critique dressed as an art gallery, no villain pathologized into a lesson, no history to correct. It is a pulpy serial killer picture that wants to startle and mostly settles for competence. Roger Ebert was generous. Ethan Hawke later called it terrible. Both men were describing the same movie, which is its own kind of achievement.