Taking Lives: Critic Reviews

A Silence of the Lambs - meets - Talented Mr. Ripley knockoff with all the gore and premonitory 'darkness' and none of the intrigue.

Angelina Jolie plays an F.B.I. profiler on the trail of a sick and ingenious serial killer. Is there anything more to say? Not really.

From the opening credits, Lives seems bound to recapture the queasy mood of 1995's Seven. But it's too dull to even pull off quease until a notably unpleasant climax.

Would have to work nights to reach mediocrity.

Nosedive it does, abandoning all pretense of style and eccentricity for at-times laughable predictability.

Taking Lives is so lifeless and beside the point that its DVD version should skip letterboxing and just be shown in a heavy chalk outline.

If the Naqoyqatsi-lite score by Philip Glass doesn't exactly make sense of the film's sketchy identity politics, it does complement its utter ridiculousness.

Even with Angelina Jolie thrown in for forensic sex appeal, this dog won't hunt.

An above-average thriller.

Jolie needs a role with teeth, not one that merely exploits her bee-stung lips.

Taking Lives is actually an effective thriller, on its modest but stylish level.

An unimaginative, protracted gore-fest that swipes from David Fincher's Seven like a cinematic pickpocket but only comes up with lint.

If Taking Lives starts off with a modicum of wit and creepy-crawly scares, it winds up somewhere else altogether.

Taking Lives clearly aims to be a stylish, eerie chiller along the lines of Seven. Despite a nerve-wracking car chase and one jump-out-of-your-pants shock, the results are more like Three.

Taking Lives isn't bad, really, it just isn't distinctive.

Caruso constantly takes the movie down blind alleys while emptying his always-handy crime-movie handbook of every artificial plot device.

Screenwriter Jon Bokenkamp litters the trajectory with more red herrings than the traffic can bear in less than two hours.

Somber, absorbing thriller that treads familiar psycho serial killer terrain with style.

Taking Lives is smarter than your average serial-killer movie, thanks to unusually fleshed-out characters inhabited by a high- pedigree cast.

While it's not in a league with The Silence of the Lambs, it works in a similarly efficient way.

While not breaking any new ground, director D.J. Caruso's movie also doesn't disappoint.

Best of all, it doesn't star Ashley Judd, who has made a wearying specialty out of playing tough-tender female cops. Danger-prone Angelina Jolie is on the case here -- an improvement that pays big dividends throughout.

Jolie is far too good for this tripe but she does give the film its only believable moments, and for the first half, her concentration makes you watch her intently.

Caruso is a much more resourceful director than this material deserves, but I resented being two steps ahead of the genius profiler and the genius serial-killer.