+2
Taxi Driver- 1/10
This movie did not live up to the hype for me at all. I do not guess what the fuss is all about. Martin Scorcese is one of my favourite directors but this movie really reduced my opinion of him.
There is very little I liked about the movie, I guess Jodie Foster's very brief role was excellent and it was an important break for my favourite actress but honestly even her role was a massive disappointment (like the rest of the movie) in its own way, since she only appears in a handful of scenes. Considering how famous a role of hers this was, I was expecting to see a lot more of her.
There were a few occasional funny dialogues and a few likable side characters but most of the movie was listening to De Niro's character's mad, meaningless ravings. The whole premise of the movie seemed very weird to me, and not in a good way. There is nothing interesting about seeing the day to day life of a socially maladjusted taxi driver. At times I wondered whether the intention was that Travis was a person with a disability, but I think it's more likely he was just very poorly, weirdly written.
The last act quickly goes into the utterly absurd, with Travis arming himself like Arnie in Commando (how does he have the money for all this ?) and attempting to assassinate a presidential candidate while sporting a mohawk. This would seem far-fetched in a crappy tv show, let alone a supposedly 'great' movie.
With the exception of Ms. Foster and maybe the bald cab driver I found the acting also to be very meh. De Niro didn't impress me much, but the real shocker was Harvey Keitel. I didn't even recognize him in this movie and his whole character was very dull and unexceptional. Betsy and Tom were also odd and not very good performances, or even well-written characters.
The cinematography too I found very jarring, the action sequence and the scenes that followed it were very poorly shot indeed. I fail to see why anyone would want or need a 2 minute close-up of the road.
The ending also felt completely out of tone for the movie and was downright soap-operatic. Travis becomes a hero and gets the girl ? Really ? I wonder if the last 10 minutes of the movie were tacked on by a studio executive because compared to the rest of the movie they seem like an effect of split-personality disorder.
Above all else I found the character of Travis deeply unlikeable and very unrelatable, I do not understand why anyone would want to make a movie around this dollar-store Mark David Chapman (or I guess Proto-Mark David Chapman since this movie was from 1976) let alone turn him into some sort of hero.
The movie doesn't really have a plot. I think Scorcese thought himself a little too clever in his youth while making this movie and was trying to create something really edgy and artistic to shock his audience's sensibilities, but ended up with a movie that doesn't actually say anything, that doesn't have much deep meaning hidden in its metaphors. It's a film that only has the pretense of greatness, like cheap imitation. It's like something a first-year film student would make. I cannot believe that this is the same Martin Scorcese who has directed so many masterpieces.
Why some people see this as some sort of great movie I will never understand. It is easily one of the worst films I have ever watched. In fact I liked almost nothing about it.