by MARK SLUTSKY

In a movie about a super-charged, super-fast, super-crazy taxi - a movie that happens to be called Taxi - you expect the film to milk its one gimmick to death and spend some time in the titular taxicab. But not this Taxi, a remake of the 1998 Luc Besson-produced French hit. Starring Queen Latifah as the crazy cabby and Jimmy Fallon (Saturday Night Live) as the loveable cop who hitches a ride, director Tim Story's disastrous cab pile-up is as incompetent as it is shameless.

It's shameless in that the bad guys are a squad of Brazilian supermodels, led by Gisele Bündchen; Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love" blasts over the titles and there's even a "subtle" reference to 9/11 on Fallon's lapel. And it's incompetent in that it seems to keep the main characters away from Latifah's super-taxi as much as possible; there are about five bank robberies that we never actually see; and it takes about half an hour before anything really happens.

The movie starts by introducing Latifah's character, an outrageous bike courier-turned-taxi driver who's taken the liberty of souping up her ride with all sorts of illegal improvements. In what feels like an hour later, she bumps into Fallon, a seemingly very stupid police officer who loses his driver's licence and thus commandeers Latifah's car. Together they bicker like only poorly written cop comedy characters can, as they half-heartedly hunt down those Brazilian bombshell bandits. Shockingly, Fallon is thrown off the case. Yet, he continues to pursue it anyway (for some reason, so does Latifah). Somewhere along the way, Ann-Margret drops in unexpectedly as Fallon's drunken mother.

There's not much to see here, folks. Fallon, fresh off of SNL, is obviously trying to make it as a comedy/action star. But boy, does he fall flat (he's not helped any by the script) and even Latifah's amiable presence can't keep every scene from drifting off into total boring nothingness. What we have here is basically another mismatched buddy cop disaster, albeit with a goofy hook - a hook that's barely even used.

Taxi opens Friday, Oct. 8

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