April 16, 2009 | lists

Taxi drivers in most films have more or less the screen presence of a coffee table. They are there because the car cannot drive itself and the screenplay calls for a wayward woman to smoke a cigarette and rue how her life has gone down the crapper or a setting for key dialogue when no park benches are free [Ten points to anyone who can name -- without Googling, honors system here -- the taxi driver during Brando's "I coulda been a contender!" speech]. Taxi drivers are mostly looked to for ethnic humor, invaluable life lessons dispensed at stop signs, or to provide a back of the head for some expository dialogue.

One marvels at the highs and lows of being a taxi driver in a Hollywood film. Either you have some fat cat or hero in a hurry reaching blindly into his wallet and tossing you a presumably large amount of cash and saying “Keep the change,” or you have damage being visited on your ride that would test the limits of even the most liberal insurer.

But they are an integral part of the urban movie landscape, telling us that we are indeed not in Kansas anymore, but sucking the fumes deep in the urban jungle. They have given us some great movie moments, and here are our Top 5 Taxi Driver Movies (No points for guessing who placed first)!

5. Fifth Element. The Fifth Element is a stirring and remarkable visual achievement—and we’re just talking about Mila Jovovich. Bruce Willis plays 23rd century taxi driver Korben Dallas, obviously among the more active of his profession, who tries to prevent a planet from hurtling towards the earth. Had it been just an asteroid, perhaps they could have tied Chris Tucker to a rocket to intercept it. Tucker singlehandedly removed this movie from ever being mentioned in the same breath as Bladerunner with a performance so annoying it had viewers wondering if even Mila Jovovich was worth stomaching his shtick. And perennial everyman Bruce saves the day.

4. Taxi. An aspiring Formula 1 driver makes the natural choice to ease himself into that career by cutting his teeth as a cabbie. His frenetic, high-speed dangerous psycho driving goes by unnoticed — unsurprising for anyone who has driven in a taxi in a major city on a road with no traffic –that is, until he’s busted for major traffic violations and agrees to help out a sad-sack cop track down German bank robbers in exchange for his freedom.

Luc Besson wrote the screenplay for this as well as Fifth Element and it apparently only took him 30 days. This is not to be confused with the Jimmy Fallon remake, 10 of which of equal merit could have been written over a long weekend. Fallon continues to amaze in that he’s monumentally untalented yet lands plumb roles. Gotta hand it to him, but if that hand is closed into a fist, all the better. The film co-stars Queen Latifah, speaking of modes of transportation, who factors heavily into our Top 10 Actors Whose Bad Movies are Always Shown on Airplanes). But don’t take our word for it, check out the scant 11% who rated it positively on Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s a sampling:

• “Latifah and Fallon bring in their own flair of comedic skills [sic] to make a difference” and from the same reviewer (who is responsible for vetting reviewers on there anyway???) “Fallon, in his lead role, is somewhat bland as a comic. Some of his humor works and some don’t.”

• and “A laid-back, inoffensive time-waster” from another.

This popular box-office shattering French series, is much better than Bill Cosby playing a lead-footed ambulance driver in Mother, Jugs & Speed, which is several fares out to the airport better than 2004’s Taxi.

3. Collateral. Taxi drivers get some strange requests. In our book, The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery, we recounted the tale of an Australian politician who — to borrow the favorite of the many phrases used in our book to refer to drunkenness — got  “pissed as a newt” at a society ball, was unable to locate his own home on the return drive, ended up demanding to be taken to the airport and later to a distant province before the driver finally had enough. All this on the taxpayer’s dime of course. Jamie Foxx picks up hitman Tom Cruise who has more in mind than a midnight run to the KFC and the 7-11 for some porno mags.

2. Night on Earth. One of the best taxi films ever made and Jarmusch again displays his incredible skill at diminishing the viewer’s natural antipathy toward Roberto Benigni.  Five vignettes follow the passing connection between taxi driver and passenger in cities around the world. Here, a cabbie gives a Teutonic passenger, Helmut, Ebonics lessons as they compare headgear and names that sound like headgear.  “Fresh het!” Amazing Jim Jarmusch film that more than makes up for the awfulness of Coffee and Cigarettes, and the second installment after Lost in Translation of the “Bill Murry as the Clown Who Cries”, series, the overrated Broken Flowers.

1. Taxi Driver. The controversial number 1 remains incredibly potent today, despite the lightening of the blood and the excising of racial epithets (Scorsese instead opted for subtly hinting at Travis Bickle’s racism in the all night coffee shop scene with the pimps). The film is also known for one of the worst first-dates in non-horror film cinema history, when De Niro takes Cybil Shepherd to a screening of Language of Love, a Swedish sex-ed flick, at a time when Times Square wasn’t a sanitized Disneyland.