Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Bruce Goodison
Starring: Nick Frost, Synnøve Karlsen, Luke Norris
It's never good when a character in a movie tells a story and it turns
out to be far more compelling than the actual movie itself. That happens
early on in Black Cab. At a dinner to announce his engagement to his long-suffering girlfriend
Anne (Synnove Karlsen), controlling shitheel Patrick (Luke Norris) relates an urban legend-esque tale of a woman driving home late at
night and realising she's being followed by another car. It's a cracking
piece of economical storytelling, filled with tension and boasting a
terrifying denouement. It's everything Black Cab isn't.
Far from pacey and economical, the effect of watching director Bruce Goodison and writer David Michael Emerson's supernatural thriller is like finding
yourself stuck in rush hour traffic for 90 minutes. It gets off to an
intriguing start that promises a fun ride but quickly runs out of
narrative gas.
Following their dinner party, Anne just wants to go home alone but
Patrick insists on accompanying her. They hail a black cab and set
off. The anonymous driver (Nick Frost, who is also credited as
writing additional material with Virginia Gilbert) is
initially jovial and chatty in that classic London cabbie manner. He
even senses Anne's discomfort and offers to kick Patrick out of his cab.
But things take a dark turn when the cabbie tasers Patrick with a
cattle-prod, knocking him unconscious. Anne is bound in the backseat as
the cabbie takes the couple to Maybell Hill, a stretch of road he claims
is England's most haunted.
For all its supernatural elements, Black Cab is essentially a survival thriller. As the audience, our
motivation is to root for Anne to free herself from this desperate
situation. But the film breaks a storytelling 101 rule by practically
removing any hope that Anne might be able to escape. Any half-decent
thriller sets up goals for the protagonist to aim for, as if the
audience believes they're truly hopeless we simply stop caring. Anne is
as hopeless a heroine as you could find, and the movie barely offers so
much as a morsel of hope to keep us invested. She's literally tied up in
the back of a cab being driven down a road with no other traffic for
most of the run time, and the film barely teases any way in which she
might get out of this predicament.
With our protagonist practically out of the picture and doing nothing
to disrupt the narrative, we're left to listen to the cabbie ramble on
as he essentially explains the plot while glancing over his shoulder.
You can see why Frost was drawn to the role as it allows him to indulge
his usual comedy shtick while also giving him the opportunity to play an
intimidating villain. He's very good in both aspects, but the more we
learn about the character the more contradictory he becomes. Once we
learn the cabbie's true motivation it just doesn't make sense that he
would have been playing this scenario for laughs for so long.
Every woman has a fear of getting into a cab with the wrong driver, so
a movie with Black Cab's premise is onto a winner straight away. It's remarkable then that it
fluffs its lines so badly and fails to exploit the claustrophobic
tension of its initial setup. I'd wait for the next one if I were
you.
Black Cab is on Shudder from
November 8th.
