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BY TOM MEEK
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Tim Story, the director of Barbershop, and Luc Besson, the would-be French auteur behind La femme Nikita and The Fifth Element, combine with SNL’s Jimmy Fallon in this loose remix of the 1998 Gérard Pirès oddity for which Besson wrote the script. Here Besson’s affection for cabbies (remember Bruce Willis’s intrepid hack in Element?) gets a gender change as Queen Latifah plays Belle Williams, a driver with NASCAR aspirations. She gets tangled up with Andy, a screw-up of a cop who’s lost his driver’s license and has to take a cab to crime scenes. Andy’s investigating a string of bank robberies perpetrated by four pouty Brazilian babes (led by supermodel Gisele Bündchen), and if he doesn't bring them to justice, his career is toast. Latifah, who adds cream to everything she’s dumped in, carries the film, and Ann-Margret is uproarious as Andy’s margarita-swilling mom, but Fallon never finds his stride. Taxi is an uneven buddy romp that’s as unreliable and jerky as a ride in Belle’s trumped-out Crown Vic. At the Apple Valley, Entertainment, Flagship, Holiday, Providence Place 16, and Showcase cinemas. (97 minutes)
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