Taxi 5
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 Va bene ma bella LALALA!
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Taxi 5 is a French action comedy film directed by French actor, film director, screenwriter and producer Franck Gastambide, produced by French film director, screenwriter and producer Luc Besson and written by Gastambide, Besson and Stéphane Kazandjian. The film stars Gastambide, Algerian-Moroccon-French humorist and actor Malik Bentalha, Algerian-French actress Sabrina Ouazani, French actor Bernard Farcy and Italian actor Salvatore Esposito.
It was released on April 11, 2018, in France and serves as the fifth and current film in the Taxi franchise while featuring completely new characters.
Plot
A police officer who's transferred to the police of Marseilles gets assigned to take down a group of Italian robbers who drive the powerful Ferraris with the older nephew of Daniel Morales, a terrible driver who gets the legendary white taxi.
Why It Sucks
- To get the taxi out of the garage, the very idea of making a sequel to the Taxi franchise was bad from the start because not only was the franchise destroyed with Taxi 3 and 4 but just like Space Jam: A New Legacy, it came out way too late to be relevant due to the aforementioned failure of Taxi 3 and 4 causing the film to lose popularity and therefore be stuck in development hell for 12 years (not counting the short-lived French-American spinoff TV series Taxi Brooklyn).
- Just like Taxi 4, the film lacks the charm that Taxi 1, its American remake, 2 and 3 have.
- Frank Gastambide is an awful choice for directing this film as he has very little experience as a director and had only directed a handful of short films, music videos and Pepsi commercials prior to directing it.
- None of the actors from the previous Taxi films (except Édouard Montoute and Bernard Farcy) make any cameos or role reprisals in this film and the new actors are bland and boring.
- Even the two recurring characters are poorly represented. Alain Tresor (Édouard Montoute) was only seen at the beginning of the film before being hit by a van and was left out until the end when he watched the taxi's wreckage being featured on the news on his hospital ward's TV, leaving Commissaire Gérard Gibert (Bernard Farcy) to be the exposition giver to the two new main characters.
- The new characters meanwhile are bland and unlikeable:
- Sylvain Maro, the main character, is an unkind, semi-corrupt and idiotic cop, joining the municipal police only because he slept with the Mayor's wife. He was also very mean to Eddie and destroyed the iconic white Peugeot taxi with almost no regrets.
- Eddie Makhlouf, the movie's deuteragonist, is frequently treated poorly by Sylvain and lacks his uncle Daniel's charm. Additionally, he doesn't even know how to drive the iconic white Peugeot taxi properly even though he himself is a taxi driver (partly justified as it's heavily modified to be several times faster than a regular taxi).
- Samia Makhlouf, Eddie's sister, is a Mary-Sue who is only there because she is Sylvain's love interest.
- The acting ranges from mediocre to bad thanks to Frank Gastambide's complete inexperience with the Taxi franchise and directing in general.
- The plot is lazy and rehashed from the previous Taxi films despite its script being helmed partially by its creator Luc Besson.
- In addition to being generic, this plot hardly advances and relies on a host of gags that are often not funny and boring.
- The introduction steals that of Welcome to the Sticks (Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis), namely the protagonist who is transferred to the other side of France, except that where in Welcome to the Sticks the protagonist tries to appreciate the north, Sylvain takes no effort to appreciate.
- The Italian Ferrari gang is literally a poor man's version of the German Mercedes gang from Taxi, minus the latter's personalities, charm and skills.
- The movie has several plot holes that will remain unanswered until Taxi 6 sees the light of day:
- How did Sylvain and Eddie get into the taxi in the shipping container when the car was exactly the width of the container?
- How and when did Commissaire Gérard Gibert become the Mayor?
- How did Alain survive the hit-and-run accident via a speeding van?
- There are multiple obvious errors throughout the movie like the taxi speeding past the same civilian cars twice during the first driving sequences and a very visible stunt double during the part where the taxi drives between 2 trams and the camera cut to Eddie's reaction.
- The car physics tend to be very sloppy as if they are driving on ice. The most egregious example would be the pile-up scene on the car of the Minister of the Interior.
- Misrating: The movie was rated TP ("Tous publics") by the French film rating system and G by the Japanese film rating system, which is the equivalent of a G in the American film rating system. It should be rated 18 as there's literally a striptease scene in a movie rated for all audiences.
- Adding on to WIS #13, the scene in question has Eddie stripping for his girlfriend Sandy but not only is it inappropriate but also badly acted by Malik Benthalha.
- The final action sequence ended insultingly when the two protagonists destroyed the taxi by jumping it off a cliff and smashing it into a luxury yacht. This shows how little Frank Gastambide cared about the franchise.
- The worst part is that no one except Eddie and Alain feels remorseful for Daniel, who is the taxi's creator. Not even Samia, who insisted on being chauffeured in the taxi.
- For an action comedy movie, the film has very few action scenes compared to the previous 4 Taxi films and Taxi 1's US remake.
- The film overuses puke and toilet humour throughout, with the first joke in that category happening 5 minutes into the film!
- Similar to the New Adventures of Aladdin or Seriel (Bad) Weddings, the film is full of discriminatory, racist or grossophobic jokes in a film classified for all audiences.
- It also reuses a lot of elements from the Fast & Furious franchise, most notably Sylvain being a bearded police version of Dominic Toretto and the yacht crash copying Brian and Roman's car jump and subsequent crash into the villain's luxury yacht frame by frame. This is ironic as Taxi 1 actually was one of the inspirations for The Fast and the Furious, yet this film ripped off numerous elements from it and its many sequels. This shows that it is very unoriginal in terms of its plot and stunts.
- This movie alone permanently killed off the Taxi franchise for good and caused Taxi 6 to be stuck in 4-year pre-production hell (as of July 8, 2022).
Redeeming Qualities
- The movie's soundtrack is decent with some nice music like "Get Low" by Dillon Francis and DJ Snake and "Va Bene" by L'Algérino.
- Commissaire Gérard Gibert is still funny despite his flaws.
- Eddie's strip scene is so ridiculous it's hilarious.
- Fine cinematography.
Reception
Taxi 5 received overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics and fans of the Taxi franchise alike, though a bit more favourable compared to Taxi 3 and 4.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a critic rating of 0% ("certified rotten").
Argentinian film critic website Ortros Cines gave the movie a 1.5/5, criticizing the film's reuse of numerous elements from the Fast & Furious franchise and awful and predictable jokes "worthy of the worst Argentinian comedies from the 80s".
Videos
External Links
Taxi 5 at the Internet Movie Database
Taxi 5 on Letterboxd
Comments
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