Taxi 4 (2007)

Taxi 4 arrives as the fourth installment in a franchise that has never pretended to be about anything other than a Peugeot traveling faster than is legally advisable. The plot concerns a Belgian criminal, a mistaken identity, a fired policeman, and the retrieval of documents from a bank vault. It is a machine built for velocity and slapstick, and it functions. Gérard Krawczyk directs with the efficiency of a man who knows exactly which buttons the audience wants pressed, and presses them.

Assessing the film through the lens of contemporary social consciousness is a brief exercise. There is no LGBTQ content, no feminist argument, no racial commentary, no climate concern. The bank heist generates no critique of wealth or class. The bumbling commissioner is played for pratfalls, not as a portrait of a neurological condition. Petra, the capable operative played by Emma Wiklund, exists as a genre fixture, a woman who can handle herself because the script requires someone competent in a room of incompetents. This is not a statement. It is staffing. The Belgian villain's nationality is a running gag, and the film would be genuinely puzzled by any suggestion that it meant something more.

The cast reflects Marseille's actual demographics, with Samy Naceri, Mourade Zeguendi, and Driss Spinosa appearing as ordinary participants in an ordinary caper. Nobody remarks on it. Nobody is meant to. The film makes no attempt to instruct, improve, or moralize its audience, which in 2007 was not considered a failing. We are left with a brisk, loud, largely weightless comedy that asks nothing of its viewers beyond their attention for ninety minutes. There are worse transactions.