In this stylish but circuitous and needlessly complicated kidnap thriller, cuddly Nick Frost takes a sharp left turn away from his comedy origins and unearths his inner psychopath, as a taxi driver who may sound like a harmless cockney oaf, but who would give Travis Bickle a run for his fare.
The opening credits – all floating camerawork, thick overcast skies and Nathaniel Hawthorne forests – hint at some invisible supernatural presence guiding the characters’ motivations, or at least leading them up some eldritch garden path. Or maybe it’s all in the maidenly heroine Synnøve Karlsen’s imagination, as her subconscious mind grapples with the implications and emotions of her incipient pregnancy.
After an uncomfortable dinner party with her friends, she seems in need of a white knight to rescue her from her arrogant wanker of a boyfriend (Luke Norris). What she gets is Frost, initially playing up to the funny sidekick persona he developed with Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, but then the humour gets a bit inappropriate, the friendly comments a bit too personal, and before you can say “two seconds!” we’re at his mercy.
The film works best when we’re trapped in the cab with the three of them, drowning in the diseased primary colours of the lighting, choppy editing between multiple tight angles on stressed faces intensifying the claustrophobia. Indeed, there’s a whole subplot about ghosts that could probably have been excised altogether, giving Frost the opportunity to carry even more of the story on his rugby-player shoulders. After all, it’s far more watchable when he’s scaring the crap out of us than when it leads us up a spectral blind alley.
The plot sprints impatiently into its cat-and-mouse battle when a false sense of security might have prompted a more dynamic emotional response, and allowed the otherwise flabby second act to really drag us through the wringer. Perhaps because the movie sells itself on Frost’s antagonistic role, the director simply decided against wasting everyone’s time hoovering the rug when he’s just going to yank it out from under them anyway.Black Cab is built around the kind of urban myth that’s migrated from the campfire to the pyjama party, inherently dismissive of the millennia of civilisation meant to protect us from our own darkest instincts. Its lack of incident makes it feel baggy even over an hour and a half, but it’s a nasty enough little piece of work when its star suffuses it with so much physical and psychological menace that you’re intimidated into giving him an over-generous tip.
-Stew Mott-
