Inspired by Dr Cai Mingjie`s biography, `Diary of a Taxi Driver: True Stories from Singapore`s Most Educated Cabdriver”, Taxi! Taxi! centres on Professor Chua (Gurmit Singh), a microbiology researcher who loses his job and ends up driving a cab. Needless to say, he has to keep up with the joneses, without letting his wife (Jazreel Low), son (Royston Ong) and grandmother (Lai Meng) find out. This gets exponentially more complicated thanks to his inadvertent friendship with Ah Tau (Mark Lee), a veteran taxi driver who has (surprise, surprise) an Ah Beng streak and an adorable tyke (Chua Jin Sen).
We`ll start with the good first: Taxi! Taxi! features the trademark humour you`d come to expect from local comedy stalwarts Gurmit Singh and Mark Lee, and their chemistry is what buoys the first, lighter half of the movie. The characters are highly likable, although they`re painted with garish strokes. The most touching moments of the movie are undoubtedly the scenes between Ah Tau and his son, and the former`s growing sense of responsibilty, which is the closest the movie comes to a sense of character development.
Unfortunately, Taxi! Taxi! also features the trademark flaws of most local Chinese films: a tin ear for dialogue, cartoony sound effects and inexcusably ham-fisted melodrama in its latter half. Just because Singaporean audiences have grown used (or perhaps numb) to these qualities doesn`t make them any less detrimental to local productions. Taxi! Taxi!`s greatest misstep, however, is that its plot progresses in a haphazardly episodic fashion that never depicts Gurmit`s character learning from his new job. As a result, the movie`s premise becomes a largely wasted opportunity, and vastly different from the original source material.
What crosses the border of tolerable into that of aggravating, however, is director Kelvin Sng`s inexplicable urge to pepper his apolitical comedy with incoherent digs at government policy. Taxi! Taxi! is neither audacious nor intelligent enough to pose as a social commentary, and the anti-foreigner sentiment on display merely seems like a weak attempt at populist pandering, rather than bold critique. The screenwriters also seem to have a talent for being unintentionally offensive, with Mark Lee riffing a particularly insensitive line towards the end about visually disabled individuals.
Taxi! Taxi! is a run-of-the-mill local comedy that will prove passably entertaining to those who are fans of its leading men. There are certainly some laughs to be had, but too many wrong turns for this to be an entertaining ride.
Summary: Gets to its location, but only with flat tires and a busted engine.
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
Raphael Lim