Taxi (1998)

Some assignments arrive like a bottle of Beaujolais nouveau: young, unpretentious, and entirely without aspiration to be mistaken for something grander. Taxi, the 1998 French action comedy from director Gérard Pirès and writer-producer Luc Besson, is a machine built for a single purpose, which is to move a white Peugeot 406 very quickly through Marseille while a bumbling inspector complains from the passenger seat. There is no thesis hiding in the glovebox. Daniel Morales wants his taxi license, Émilien Coutant-Kerbalec wants a date with Sergeant Petra, and a gang of German bank robbers wants to be caught cinematically. The film delivers all three and then stops.

It is a relief, honestly, to sit through a mainstream crowd-pleaser and find nothing worth annotating. The cast is diverse in the casual, unremarked manner of a port city, and the film treats this as neither achievement nor subject. Women appear as a girlfriend and a sergeant, both competent, neither positioned as a statement. The villains are German because the plot needs efficient drivers, not because the screenplay holds opinions about Germany. Nobody lectures. Nobody learns a lesson about society. The burned apartment, the duplicated traffic-light keys, the pizza delivery boys with walkie-talkies: these are jokes, and the film is content to let them remain jokes. Émilien's incompetence is played for pratfalls, not diagnosis.

There is craftsmanship here, and there is also an absence, and the absence is the interesting part. No cause is advanced. No audience is scolded. The film asks only that we enjoy a car chase, and it is polite enough not to ask anything else. A clean specimen, then, and a rare one. We file it without complaint.