Angelina Jolie is an FBI agent that goes to Canada to help out on a serial-killer case. The killer she's profiling has been stealing the identities of his victims, but has finally left a witness.

Of course it has to have a twist, the days of Silence of the Lambs where a great story was enough are gone, now we gotta be surprised. The thing is, when you know you're going to be surprised, only really dumb people aren't waiting for it. It's like with The Twilight Zone, at first the endings were really cool, but after a few episodes you started looking for it and it wasn't so impressive anymore. The problem with Taking Lives is they feed you bad info and mislead you some, so you can't see the incredibly obvious twist coming. That's like in the old whodunits, when they'd hold back info that was needed to figure it out, so when the gumshoe finally explained it you were more annoyed than satisfied. It's cheap and I call shenanigans.

The good is that Angelina's hot and shows a little skin to keep us from getting too rowdy about the twist. Also all the corpses looked really nifty, damn good corpses.

The downside is that that was all the upside. It was a good story, but it was damn sure not special. The truth is it's completely unaffecting, except for a shock or two, the movie did nothing for me at all. I'm not saying I regret watching it or didn't enjoy it, I did, but if I live my entire life without ever seeing it again, I'm fine with that. Damn fine.

In summary, except the nudity, it was no better than a good episode of CSI, and I'm not a big fan of CSI.

4 out of 10 movies that didn't inspire a funny rating

I need to start this commentary by saying that I enjoyed this film. As far as suspense films go this one is pretty decent and worth the time it takes to watch. That being said, I would have liked to seen a couple of things done differently.

I would have made the movie in a completely english speaking Canadian city. The french accent sounds good when speaking French. However, when there are detectives talking about potentially crucial points to the film, I want to be able to understand what they are saying and not have to go back and use the english subtitles.

Secondly, the Horrorist is right on with his point about twist endings. Don't mislead us with some bogus side story twist. Make the twist a little less obvious by making the twist an intelligent one (i.e. The Usual Suspects).

6 out of 10 good reasons to call AAA when you get a flat tire

p.s. Kudos to Angelina Jolie for not being the typical Hollywood actress who, when she makes it big, refuses to do nude scenes for the rest of her career.