Directed by
Richard Donner
135 minutes
Rated M
Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
Conspiracy Theory
If you wanted to watch a movie about a New York taxi driver with paranoid tendencies and a crush on a beautiful woman he sees through a window then you'd be watching Martin Scorsese’s 1976 benchmark, Taxi Driver, rather than this silly, would-be crowd pleasing action film from Richard Donner and Mel Gibson, the team who brought you the box-office-busting Lethal Weapon franchise.Writer Brian Helgeland presumably set out to ring some changes on Scorsese’s classic by moving it away from mean streets realism and into some high stakes entertainment territory but the result is too glib to sustain more than the most undemanding audience.
Headliner Gibson mugs his way through his part as an apparent nutter and Julia Roberts plays hers as coy and sexy as all get out in what is in essence supposed to be a charmingly off-beat romance. Throw in the FBI, CIA and some kind of secret service agency and you’ve got the excuse to wrap the pair in plenty of life-threatening, heart-uniting action. To be fair there are a couple of well-staged sequences, one which is quite amusing involving Gibson escaping his kidnappers in a wheelchair and another in which he torches his apartment but as the narrative progresses the film becomes less convincing and the execution more formulaic. Donner throws directorial cliché after cliché at the proceeding but fails to cover up the yawning faults which open irrevocably once Roberts’ Alice inexplicably escapes her Connecticut assassins and turns up back in New York to save her unlikely paramour.
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